These people may not have known much about algebraic topology or the history of post-Impressionism, but they knew how to organise. They were not the objects of Beveridge’s benevolent paternalism but self-determining actors. They also knew about want and hardship, justice and solidarity. The truly ignorant were those highly-educated undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge who acted as strike-breakers, and who knew nothing of the conditions in which most of their fellow country people had to live. Ten years later, a new generation of the erudite and educated would boo the hunger marchers.

You don’t need a doctorate in maths to know that your wage packet is shrinking. People who are politically apathetic because they believe with some justice that Westminster politics will never do much for them can become knowledgeable overnight when you threaten their jobs or try to run a motorway through their back gardens. Few traditions are as admirable as that of self-taught working people, including the women mill workers in Victorian Lancashire who would rise an hour before work in order to read Shakespeare together. It was for these patronisingly named “autodidacts” — a category which sometimes included anyone who hadn’t been to Oxbridge — that Ruskin College, the Workers’ Educational Association and the so-called “Extra-Mural” departments of universities were to provide.

What, in any case, if knowledge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? The literary education that the Shakespeare-reading mill workers would have received, had they by some miracle broken into academia, would have been pretty worthless. Literary studies at the time were a combination of bone-dry scholarship and extravagant waffle. Thomas Hardy’s Jude Fawley, a stone mason who tries to get into Oxford, is rebuffed by the dons, advised to stick to his lowly station in life, and, in a typical Hardyesque irony, goes back to repairing the very college walls which shut him out.

Yet Hardy makes it clear that Jude’s ambitions are wrong-headed as well as unrealistic. He is better off outside this citadel of antiquated learning, exercising the practical skills which his author so admired. Hardy himself was no country bumpkin but was trained as an architect, and had a deep respect for manual labour. When, as a grand literary celebrity, he unveiled a plaque to open a new building, he was seen to run his hand across the stone and smell it. He, too, was described as an autodidact, even though he received a better education than the vast majority of his compatriots. It was that Oxbridge thing again.

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By Terry Eagleton

There is another sense in which knowledge is overrated. Socrates taught that we only do wrong out of ignorance; if only we had the right understanding we would be virtuous. Hardly anyone has ever fallen for this vastly improbable doctrine, least of all St. Paul, who in his Epistle to the Romans claims that we don’t understand our own actions: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…” What Paul sees but Socrates doesn’t is that we are torn, self-divided creatures, whose knowledge is out of sync with our desires. There is nothing wrong with reason — in fact, without it we will perish — but it doesn’t go all the way down. If it is to prevail, it must sink its roots into our senses and affections and shape them from the inside, so that what we ought to do is also what we want to do. Duty and obligation alone simply won’t hack it. The alternative is for reason to repress the senses and affections; and if this happens too violently, we tend to fall ill. The sickness in question is what Freud calls neurosis.

Freud had a profound respect for reason, which he thought would win through in the end. That he did so comes as something of a surprise, given that he is generally seen as both a pessimist and an irrationalist. But reason will only flourish if it is aware of its limits. Beyond those frontiers lies what Donald Rumsfeld, in his sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom, would call a known unknown, and Freud called the unconscious. Because they are unaware of what goes on in this dark region, human beings are opaque to themselves.

This isn’t only Freud’s view, but one of the most typical beliefs of the modern age. There was a time when we thought that other people might be hard to decipher, but at least we were transparent to ourselves. From Nietzsche to Freud, however, there was a dawning recognition that this is the last thing we are. Not only don’t we know ourselves, but this ignorance is vital if we are to operate as individuals. Ignorance is good for you. Just as we couldn’t speak coherently if we were thinking about the rules of grammar which govern what we say, so we can’t act, feel and think without repressing a good deal that goes into our making.

So repression is good for you as well, though not too much of it. What makes us what we are must necessarily fall outside the scope of our knowledge. Trying to examine it would be like trying to jump on your shadow, or pick yourself up by your own bootstraps. There is a fissure in our being which runs right down the middle. Or as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan enigmatically puts it: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

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Throughout the ages, human beings have been labelled the rational animal, the laughing animal, the labouring animal and so on. Now it appears that we are the sick, ignorant, neurotic, self-oblivious one, which is not the most inspiring news. We can have knowledge, of course, but this knowledge is a kind of fiction. For Nietzsche and his post-modern progeny, it consists in carving up the world in ways which facilitate our interests and desires. Knowledge is an instrument of power — a tool for mastering and organising our environment. For this purpose, Nietzsche argues, a falsehood may be more effective than the truth. In any case, truths are simply fictions that have forgotten the fact.

It would be possible to draw a line all the way from this assault on truth to the US election-deniers of today. The difference is that whereas Nietzsche and Freud argue a sophisticated case for ignorance, the election-deniers are just ignorant. Truth for them is whatever it is most convenient to believe. This is a sterile, unproductive kind of ignorance, but there are superior forms of it as well. Nobody, for example, can know the future, in the sense of what is inevitably going to happen. Not even God can do this, because there’s no such thing as what is inevitably going to happen, and therefore nothing to know. Ignorance of the future is a cause of regret to the markets. In ancient times, rulers hired soothsayers and fortune-tellers to peer into the future and assure them that their power would endure down the generations. Wall Street has its equivalents, but they are just as fallible.

In the end, however, we are not forced to choose between absolute knowledge and abysmal ignorance. There are important ways of knowing which fall somewhere in between: so-called tacit knowledge, for example, which involves knowing more than we can tell. You may know how to hum one tune while whistling another simultaneously, but just try telling someone else how to do it. Or think of bodily knowledge — the fact that I know where my left foot is without the need to visit a library or conduct an experiment. Most of our knowledge is of this kind. There’s also knowledge of other people, which doesn’t conform to scientific models. You can know others only if they disclose themselves to you — if they are present to you in a way that the furniture isn’t. Volcanologists may be present at volcanic eruptions, but volcanic eruptions are not present to them.

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Practical knowledge, of the kind Thomas Hardy admires in Jude Fawley, is a question neither of ignorance nor of the disembodied intellect. Instead, it represents the point at which knowing and doing are bound indissolubly together. In fact, the word “know” is related to the word “can” (from the Old English cunnan). It is this unity of thought and action which the activists of the General Strike demonstrated. In doing so, they created such a bogeyman that TV journalists interviewing trade unionists today tend to ask, heart in mouth, whether this dreadful event is to be repeated, no doubt ignorant of the fact that it only lasted for nine days.

Yet one shouldn’t conclude from this that knowledge is purely instrumental. There are times when people need to know in order to be free, and other times when knowledge is an end in itself. There used to be places known as universities where this kind of study could flourish, but they have mostly been wiped out, even if the buildings have been left standing. Even so, there’s no reason to learn about Balzac or Beethoven or black holes other than the delight and fascination of it. The playwright Bertolt Brecht looked forward to a future civilisation in which, he remarked, “thinking could be a real sensuous pleasure”. We have a fair way to go.

Some of the signs seem obvious now. A heartfelt but garbled message he’d chalked for my mother’s birthday before he left for work. How he would hover around, very slowly and subtly, trying to get us, his primary school-age children, to fill in forms he needed. In terms of boundless curiosity and the vastness of his references, from the intricacies of Brehon Law to the Latin names for plants to obscure battles of the Second World War, he was perhaps the smartest man I’ve ever met. And yet he carried the burden of illiteracy, silently, since he was a boy. Were I not his son in terms of unsentimental temperament, it would break my heart to think about.

In the end, there was no space to hide it any longer, no room left to evade or disguise. It was silence itself that revealed the condition. Unexpectedly and brutally stricken with Covid, my father ended up critically ill in ICU. Breathing via a ventilator and tracheostomy, it was impossible for him to talk. When the nurses approached him with pen and paper, and then an alphabet chart to point at in order to communicate, he waved them away. At first, they thought it was intransigence, but it soon became clear what the real issue was. Though an avid reader, he could not spell even the simplest of words.

For the next six months, they tried their best to understand him at his bedside, as did we; attempting, on glitching video calls, to read his lips. Due to the facial necrosis he suffered when they had laid him in the prone position to initially save his life, there wasn’t a great deal to read. In my weaker moments now, waking in the blue hours of night for instance, I feel haunted by the one word he mouthed that I could unmistakably make out — “home”, a place to which he never managed to return.

Since then, I have sought to understand the origin of my father’s illiteracy, which has led me deeper and deeper into the issue itself. Though I have worked in schools and witnessed, first-hand, children who struggled or were left behind, I hadn’t fully appreciated the immense scale of the issue. In global terms, according to UNICEF: “Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.” The OECD has found that one in six adults in England, over seven million people, “have very poor literacy skills”. Though studies differ in measuring terms, they do point to literacy difficulties being even more prevalent in Scotland (one in four people) and Northern Ireland (one in five). The Treasury’s Leitch Review of Skills in 2006 aired on the conservative estimate that “one seventh (five million) are not functionally literate”. In truth, the numbers vary and are frequently contested but all the studies suggest that millions of lives are profoundly impacted.

Why, then, is there such silence on the issue? One reason is the marginalisation of those who are affected; chief among whom are children, a group who can’t advocate for themselves, and, in particular, poor children. According to the Department of Education in 2019, 65% of children leave primary school having achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics, meaning that 35% will not.

Poverty plays a massive part in this, coupled with lack of resourcing, social exclusion, familial cycles of deprivation and so on. In 2019, End Child Poverty claimed there were 4.3 million children (30%) living in poverty in Britain. The correlation between poverty and illiteracy comes up again and again, both additionally linked to mortality. The National Literacy Trust’s findings in their Literacy and life expectancy study are staggering and scandalous: “A boy born in Stockton Town Centre (which has some of the most serious literacy challenges in the country) has a life expectancy 26.1 years shorter than a boy born in North Oxford (which has some of the fewest literacy challenges).” The issue casts a shadow over entire, foreshortened lifespans.

Economics go a long way in terms of explanation, but aren’t the only factor. Instead, we face a complex tapestry of failings and unmet needs that suggest negligence at best and, at worst, the wilful discarding of swathes of the population in terms of class, geography, demographics and so on. End Child Poverty has pointed out that “46% of children from black and minority ethnic families are growing up in poverty, compared with 26% of children in white British families”. Meanwhile, a 2018 government study of Year One pupils in England who have met the expected standards in phonics, one of the building blocks of literacy, found attainment by children from Roma and Irish Traveller backgrounds to be around half that of every other demographic (roughly 40% compared to 80%+). Between the groups are disadvantaged/working-class white boys, with 62% meeting the standard. Many groups are being let down in different though related ways. A society can be judged by how it treats its young. Children do not fail but rather are failed.

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There are always outcomes to consider. In 2009, KPMG declared that: “Low levels of literacy undermine the UK’s economic competitiveness, costing the taxpayer [up to] £2.5 billion every year.” In some ways, the possibilities are even worse than they were in my father’s day. At least he had the refuge of almost-entirely manual labour to move into. Most jobs now require a degree of literacy, with the digital revolution spreading into every aspect of life. The DCMS No Longer Optional report claimed digital skills were essential for two thirds of occupations, including 77% of so-called “low-skill jobs”. The WEF indicate the issue will only get worse, with many at risk of being left behind: “In the future, nine out of ten jobs will require digital skills, yet today 44% of Europeans aged 16-74 lack even basic digital abilities.” Employers are already feeling the deficit. In 2013, the CBI’s Changing the pace study found 32% of employers were dissatisfied with the literacy levels of young people, while a BIS report in 2016 found that “one in eight (12%) workplaces in England report a literacy and/or numeracy gap whereby at least one member of staff is unable to perform certain literacy… tasks to the level required in their day-to-day job”. While enlightening, statistics and particularly the managerial approach to society may be part of the problem, however. We need, instead, to look at the cost from a human level.

The issue is exponential and cyclical, something akin to a phenomenon called “the Drowning Machine”, which requires some explanation. My father worked for the council and though his role as a gardener-groundsman was a largely peaceful horticultural one, it involved the use of heavy machinery; equipment that could, if one were not careful, result in the loss of an eye or a finger, the permanent damaging of one’s back, and so on. One of the methods employed by managers, to underline the need for health, safety and endless vigilance, was to show the crew footage that would sear into their minds. My father would come home, take off his Hi Vis vest and boots, shake his head and say to my mother: “Christ, you wouldn’t believe what we watched in work today.” Then, thinking he was out of earshot of his kids, he would relate the real-life video horrors they’d witnessed of the Bradford City stadium fire, footage of some poor factory worker being sucked into a machine or sinking into a silo. I was a curious child, of a slightly morbid disposition, so my ears pricked up at each pitiful and graphic description.

One account became rich material for my nightmares for years to come. My father had to cut grass and tend plants on all manner of landscapes from hills to ditches to the edges of waterways. Given that his parents had both drowned in the local river, I imagine he would have been somewhat cautious — but to drive home the point, he and his colleagues were shown a video on the dangers of canals, rivers, reservoirs and other waterways. One of the most perilous were low head dams, which look fairly innocuous; a slowly drifting river that pours over a small weir with apparently minimal turbulence. Yet in certain cases, a “submerged jump” forms near the base of the dam, creating a loop of circulating water pushing downwards, back towards the dam, upwards and downwards again, in a spinning cycle. If a swimmer or kayaker is unlucky enough to be pulled down into a particularly strong version of this — and the force of water can be immense — they can find themselves stuck in a loop or maelstrom known as a “keeper”. Warning signs of this phenomena show a pirouetting figure under the water, trapped in “the drowning machine”, unable to extricate themselves and endangering the lives of would-be rescuers, who make up around a quarter of its victims.

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During my father’s six months of silence, my mind kept returning to the image of the stricken figure spinning over and over in the water, and no matter how strong they were and how bravely they fought, each time they tried to surface, another wave would hit them and successive cycles would weaken them until there was nothing left. It reminded me of the cycles of poverty I’d witnessed to which I’d lost loved ones. When someone’s life begins to fail in already difficult circumstances, there’s a tendency for problems to multiply. Disaster is effectively intersectional: spiralling finances, deteriorating psychological and physical health, social alienation, dependencies, legal issues and so on. Self-extrication is rare.

Those who leave school functionally illiterate have often been trapped in the drowning machine since childhood. Life goes wrong early — whether its poverty, abuse, neglect — and if intervention is not early, it is much harder to extricate. The “Every Child A Reader” programme notes that “70% of pupils permanently excluded from school have difficulties in basic literacy skills”. This flows, demonstrably though not inevitably, into adulthood with the Social Exclusion Unit reporting: “80% of prisoners have writing skills at or below the level expected of an 11-year-old child; the equivalent figure for reading is 50%.” The Ministry of Justice found in 2021 that 57% of prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old, with the Skills Funding Agency reporting in 2018, over a third of prisoners reported that they have “a learning disability or difficulty”. This hampers the abilities of prisoners to keep in contact with the outside world and reintegrate into it, especially through employment, with the Shannon Trust emphasising the importance of literacy in terms of reducing recidivism.

Many problems emerge from illiteracy. Some pose as solutions. If education or family cannot or will not offer a lifeline, others will step up, preying on frustration, lack of legitimate options for betterment and low self-esteem. It provides a hunting ground for exploitation by older predatory “rescuers”, in the form of gang leaders, sex traffickers, drug dealers and extremist groups. These routes seem a way out of the drowning machine but are merely a deepening of the cycle. Chances of real escape decline once you have a criminal record, are identified on the Gang Matrix or by MI5, or end up with a drug addiction.

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Here we find another troubling element to the silence surrounding illiteracy. Many of the most shameful scandals in recent decades have been to do with the abandonment and betrayal of children — paedophilia in the Catholic Church, Savile and the BBC, rape gangs in numerous English towns preying on young working-class girls, the death toll of young people through knife crime, and the epidemic of childhood poverty. All of these have faced a wall of silence, effectively disappearing the victims, for a number of reasons — deference towards powerful institutions, ideological inconvenience, callous indifference masquerading elsewhere as compassion. One overlooked factor is the gentrification of journalism away from the local and investigative, increasingly into cloistered upper-middle-class lifestyle commentaries, hot takes on passing fads and clickbait distractions. Without addressing this silence and the noise that disguises it, little will change.

All my life, I had thought that my father had escaped the drowning machine. I believed he had extricated himself from a youth of deprivation, violence, and prison. He had done so by choosing his family, his trade, his camaraderie with his workmates, his music, his bodybuilding, his love of nature, his stoicism. He was a proud man, who showed me how to live and how to die with bravery and nobility. He would never have claimed to have been a victim.

Yet I saw in those last months that he hadn’t escaped the drowning machine. As a little boy with undiagnosed dyslexia (a condition 10% of the population share), my father had been failed and, though he did the best he could to get out, it caught up with him at the end. He never made it out entirely. There are children right now in this country who are forced to carry and hide the same burden. The shame they feel has been given to them. It belongs to us.

It wouldn’t happen, would it? The rules, conventions and incentives that put that pilot in the cockpit would do so on the basis of talent, effort and training rather than birth, wouldn’t they? Other than royalty and the dustier bits of the House of Lords, our modern, egalitarian society surely has no scope for people to do important jobs just because their parents did them first. Has it?

Well here’s a number to ponder: 24. In Britain, a child who has at least one parent who is a medical doctor is 24 times more likely than other children to grow up to become a doctor. For all lawyers, the figure is around 18, and almost certainly higher for barristers. Comparable figures aren’t easily available for journalists, but no one who has spent any time in the trade would doubt that hereditary hacks are at least as common. Even outsiders can easily spot the average media types who are just plodding along in daddy’s footsteps.

The old nobility, the people with the horses and the land and the congenital defects, have largely been marginalised in 21st-century Britain. But that doesn’t mean we’ve done away with aristocracy and inherited prestige. We still have aristocrats, but instead of wearing green wellies and going shooting, they put on white coats and wigs and write columns.

That is the real story of social class and privilege in the professions. The accountancy and professional services firm KPMG is barely a minor character in that story, despite its honourable efforts. It is trying to become less posh by setting targets for senior staff from working-class backgrounds, meaning people whose highest-earning parent when they were 14 did a manual or technical job.

This is … fine. The firm has had good coverage and is setting a good example by acknowledging that class matters, alongside the other personal characteristics that employers routinely fret about. But it should be seen in perspective. KPMG has 582 UK partners and reckons 20% are currently from a working class background, meaning 116 of them. Hitting the firm’s target of 29% means another 50 or so by the end of the decade.

It is a step in the right direction, and the value of the example being set cannot be dismissed. But does it really matter if a few dozen more kids from the wrong end of the socio-economic scale hit the big time as accountants, when the properly prestigious jobs remain in the hands of the posh and their offspring? Because accountancy isn’t really posh. I mean no disrespect to KPMG, or accountants in general, when I say this. I also accept that this point demonstrates what Freud called the Narcissism of Small Differences. But there are indeed distinctions to be drawn here. All professions are elite, but some are more elite than others.

It is in what the sociologist Michael Savage calls the gentlemanly professions – law and medicine especially – where posh power and hereditary privilege are greatest. Go back to that figure about doctors’ kids becoming doctors, which comes from Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman of the LSE.

This is jaw-dropping, or should be. Medicine is a life-and-death activity, one that must be done by the very best people available.  Is it really possible that so many of the very best just happen, by sheer coincidence, to be the children of doctors? OK, the familiarity with the job you pick up from a doctor-parent might confer some advantage in training and practising. But if anyone seriously believes that aptitude for medicine is entirely inherited, I cannot find them.

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The wider data on entry to medical careers point in the same direction: what your parents do and earn matters more than your effort and ability. In 2017, a total of 320 students entering medical school by the “standard” route came from the poorest fifth of UK households. The number who came from the richest fifth was 2835. For every poor, clever teenager allowed to enter medicine, nine rich kids were admitted.

Even this marks a (modest) improvement. Among qualified medics, 74% are from the highest socio-economic group. That makes doctors the poshest professionals, beating even lawyers and journalists (both 64% posh). There are all sorts of reasons for the rich and privileged to dominate jobs such as medicine, and all sorts of why reasons poor, smart kids with stethoscopes are scarce. But whatever the causes, the consequences are stark. One of them is that we regularly put our lives in the hands of people who have not been drawn from the widest possible talent pool.

Of course, the same could be said about something that’s also vital to manage well: democratic debate. Anyone committing journalism about privilege and hereditary advantage has to acknowledge that journalists too skew towards the wealthy and advantaged. (For what it’s worth, I’d count as working class, at least on the terms used by KPMG).

The media’s poshness problem has worsened. Earlier generations of hacks contained many feral beasts who’d never set foot in a lecture theatre but used native cunning and love of language and ideas to break stories and make arguments. These days, graduates dominate and the trade has (almost) become a profession. Many print outlets are trying to remedy things by embracing apprenticeships, but it’ll be a long road back to a media whose staff reflect all of the country. The broadcasters, who have more clout, have even more work to do. Channel Four found in 2018 that two-thirds of its staff are from the higher social classes, and fewer than one in ten were working class. The BBC was 61% posh.

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This isn’t a new problem though, and it’s hard to see where political or wider social enthusiasm for change will come from.

A couple of decades ago, Tony Blair was a Prime Minister with a vast Commons majority and near-total dominance of the political arena. He looked, briefly, at reforming the truly elite professions, then backed off, deciding it was easier to fight battles against enemies such as the trade unions, Saddam Hussein, and Gordon Brown. Brown, too, nibbled at the idea of widening access to the professions, and some of his agenda survived under the Coalition and Nick Clegg. But even those modest efforts have withered and to use medicine as an example again, tepid interventions mean small changes. Despite a decade of promises and initiatives, the number of low-income youngsters entering medicine rose by just 70 in the 10 years to 2017.

Truly changing the make-up of the people who oversee our health, our laws and our debate would require the focused energy of a Prime Minister prepared to make the issue a priority over several years. Boris Johnson shows no enthusiasm for such a crusade, and as for Sir Keir Starmer, well: would anyone bet on him attempting something that was beyond Tony Blair, much less achieving it?

And where is the pressure on the politicians? Where is the outrage, the urgent demand for change? Britain should be furious about privilege and the professions. And not just because of a lack of justice but because of a lack of quality.

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That’s what debates about social mobility and fair access to the professions come down to in the end: some of the people who get the “top” jobs get them not because they’re the best at doing the work, but because of what and who their parents were. The abiding power of poshness means some second-rate still people get to do first-rank jobs. Tim Nice-but-Dim still runs quite a lot of Britain. Given the impact of the work that lawyers and doctors and, yes, journalists do, that should be nothing less than a scandal.

Yet by and large, unposh Britain just shrugs and accepts that posh people get posh jobs, since it was ever thus. It’s been 55 years since that Frost Report sketch where John Cleese looks down on Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett declares: “I know my place”, but little has really moved on, including public opinion. And until that changes, our professions, privileged and self-interested, won’t be the best, but they’ll be the ones we deserve.

The Owl Service is what I think of as a Burning Book — as opposed to book-burning, which has always been popular at certain stages of civilisational breakdown. When I think of re-reading it — as with Brighton Rock or Ladder To the Sky — I feel something which is almost fear. This, for me, is the sign not of a good book, but of a great book which will never become familiar, giving the reader both the thrill of revelation and the comfort of recognition — surely one of the most peculiar combinations of emotions.

When I first saw the 1969 Granada television adaptation at the age of ten — class war and sexual awakening played out over a long hot summer in a remote Welsh valley — I had never been involved in a love triangle. I was not yet aware that my working-class background would put me at a disadvantage, or that I would soon become obsessed with making paper owls by tracing the pattern on some manky old teacups.

But a part of me realised that the incidents in the book would somehow pertain to the adult life which I was already impatient to begin. I was obsessed with Wales; growing up in Bristol, just across the Severn Bridge, we often went there and I developed a crush on the whole country.

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Full of castles and mountains, as opposed to palaces and hills, everything seemed bigger and better in Wales — despite its shocking subjugation by England, despite all the valleys flooded to make reservoirs for the English. In an age of nations jostling for victim status, Wales remains a country that does not seek to be understood too quickly, if at all. And at a time when countries clamour for historical apologies, it’s easy to imagine Wales viewing one from England with disdain. Too much has been done. As the quote from the poet R.S Thomas says at the start of the book:

“The owls are restless. People have died here. Good men for bad reasons, better forgotten.”

When I saw the TV show, I was stimulated — probably in a not altogether wholesome manner, due to the extreme beauty of the 19-year-old actor Michael Holden, brought up in a shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia — but when I read the book I was spellbound. Alan Garner, now 86, is a character as fascinating as any of his creations. From a working-class Cheshire family he survived several life-threatening illnesses as a child; at the age of six, he was punished for speaking in his native accent when a teacher washed his mouth out with soap. The first member of his family to go to university, Oxford led him to the familiar situation of working-class children removed from their culture: “My family could not cope with me, and I could not cope with them… I soon learned that it was not a good idea to come home excited over irregular verbs.”

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The Owl Service was his fourth novel, published in 1967, influenced by a legend from The Mabinogion — the earliest prose stories in the literature of the British Isles, compiled in Welsh in the 12th century. The theme of a woman torn — literally, towards the end, as owls and flowers compete to take over her body — between two men was as relevant in the Swinging Sixties as it is now in the Tremulous Twenties.

But it’s striking that our culture has in some ways moved back towards the Medieval origin of the book’s inspiration compared to when it was published. In some ways, this is good. There is the emergence of Wales as a proudly independent nation once more, setting an example of how it is perfectly possible for a people to vote both for Labour and for Brexit.

Then there is the revival of the Welsh language; with the Act of Union in 1536, Welsh was all but banned, with a parliamentary report describing it as “a manifold barrier to the moral progress of the people”. Yet in 2008 Welsh was used at a meeting of the European Union’s Council of Ministers for the first time; in 2018 it was debuted in Parliament.

But other reversals are not so pleasing. The Owl Service is, at heart, a book about how even the most ordinary middle-class youngsters will likely lead far more interesting and rewarding lives than the most exceptional working-class kids. The savagery of class divisions, helpfully obscured these days by the liberal establishment’s obsession with race, has led to the grotesque situation where social mobility is reversing rather than improving, as it appeared to be in the Sixties.

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Garner spent four years on the book, learning Welsh “in order not to use it” — now that’s a writer. The writing is as plain as only a genius dares; the very first exchange between the housekeeper’s son Gwyn and the house’s heiress Alison — “How’s the bellyache?” “A bore” — tells us exactly which social class they are from.

In the local shop, two ordinary women discuss quite matter-of-factly how the ancient myth of the love triangle which saw two men dead and a woman turned into an owl is about to happen again. “There’s no escaping, is there? I’ll have a packet of snow flakes.”

Re-reading it, I thought most of all of the awful plight of today’s teenagers under the pandemic — grounded for what should be the most exciting time of discovery in their lives. Already having less sex than my generation, the plague (and pornography) has made the sexes even more foreign to each other, echoing the simmering chastity which torments the trio of teenagers whose trials make up the plot of this book.

Penelope Farmer wrote: “I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.” Over the past year, we have all been Alison, Gwyn and Roger, hog-tied by history, mired in hysteria and caught up in a blindfolded paranoia which makes us see our fellow citizens as harbingers of death. We are all trapped in the valley now, wondering where all the flowers have gone and whether we will be the next prey of the parliament of owls.

On paper, it seems like a straightforward political win. ENA is France’s most prestigious seat of higher education; an officer-training school for senior civil servants which has produced many leading politicians and (more rarely these days) captains of industry. In terms of its preservation of the elite, the closest British comparison might be Eton and Oxford — combined.

Indeed, when General Charles de Gaulle created ENA in 1945, his primary aim was to train a new, meritocratic elite, to replace the social elite whom he believed had betrayed France in 1940. By the 1990s, however, ENA was accused of a new form of betrayal: the creation of a self-perpetuating oligarchy which prevented more practical or inventive talent from rising in the French system.

Since then, the destruction of ENA has become a theme of French politics. The school has been constantly reformed, reduced in size and moved from Paris to Strasbourg. In fact, the all-powerful ENA of legend probably ceased to exist years ago. And yet it has remained a symbol of a know-it-all, elitist French state, with President Macron as its most perfect manifestation.

Macron graduated from ENA in 2004. A dozen years later he became President of the Republic. Laurent Fabius took only 11 years from graduation to become Socialist prime minister (1984-6). Jacques Chirac was an énarque. So was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Hollande and more than a third of the prime ministers of the Fifth Republic.

And yet despite its reputation, ENA is not fee-paying. In theory, it’s open to people of all backgrounds: the 80 students in each year class are paid a salary by the state. Entry is based on tough exams after two years of “prépas” (preparatory courses). Once they’re in, the 80 students are graded from 1 to 80, with those in the top 15 — the “botte” or boot — admitted directly into a kind of praetorian guard of the French civil service, les grand corps, when they graduate. They are guaranteed a senior job and salary for life. (For what it’s worth, Macron came 5^th in his year.)

Although theoretically a place of learning, ENA is actually a place of permanent examination — of stress-testing — rather than education. An ENA graduate once told me: “You learn nothing… It’s a system for grading you, for deciding how well you will cope with the kinds of problems that might be thrown at you.” Another well-known product of ENA in the late 1980s told me: “It was a machine for discovering how flexible your spine was. If it wasn’t flexible, you didn’t do well in the final classification.”

The Covid crisis offers evidence both for and against the ENA effect. France has got many things wrong during the last year, partly because its administrative culture is so ponderous and averse to risk. And yet, on the other hand, its state-funded economic support programme has been exemplary and much copied (including by Britain). That was shaped by Macron (ENA 2002-4), his then Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (ENA 1995-7) and most of all by his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire (ENA 1996-8).

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Even so, ENA remains shorthand for the gulf between a struggling rural and inner suburban France and the administrative, political classes who are viewed as too abstract and too arrogant to grasp the harsh realities of daily life. Macron’s decision to suppress ENA from June and replace it with another smaller college, the Institut du service public or ISP, therefore made political sense.

Stymied by the pandemic, it is the only high-profile reform he can realistically offer before the presidential election next spring. Not that it hasn’t been a long time coming; Macron promised the death of ENA during the Gilets Jaunes’s rural and suburban revolt against the elite in 2018-9. But doing it now fits in with Macron’s wider campaign to seem less arrogant and aloof, along with his apology for failing to grasp sooner the need for a rapid roll-out of Covid vaccines. Destroying ENA in its present form also fits the original Macroniste offer and vision from 2017 of making France a land of opportunity — a can-do, start-up country where top jobs in government are open to clever young people from forgotten rural France and the struggling, multi-racial banlieues.

Though hardly reported, Macron has made other advances in that direction in recent months. Two policies have been introduced to fight social and racial discrimination and allow capable young people from rural or suburban backgrounds to climb the ladder more rapidly in state jobs. In other words, the suppression of ENA will be deployed in Macron’s election campaign next spring as a way of saying: “I have started to open up and change France for the better. The pandemic got in the way — so give me more time to complete the job.”

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In truth, however, abolishing ENA is more like a burial than a murder. The school has ceased in recent years to be the ultimate pinnacle of ambition for hyper-clever, young 20-somethings in France. “ENA was once the place you had to go to prove yourself and to be sure of success. No more,” one 2016 graduate told me. “Young people now strive to go to the HEC (the top French business school) or Polytechnique (the elite engineering college). They used to ‘do ENA’ afterwards. Now they want to go to McKinsey or to Silicon Valley and then come back to France to start their own business.”

Another recent student said that he had learned since graduating that ENA no longer has the same mystique within the French political and administrative system. Ministries, he said, were turning to the big consultancy firms, such as McKinsey, to make the strategic decisions that énarques once made. “Macron’s decision fits this pattern, I fear. It’s part of a trend that’s been going on for several years to downgrade the importance of the senior French administration, to move away from a specifically French approach to French problems and become more international. In the long run, I think that’s something France will regret.”

Is it still the case that, as I was told, you “learn nothing at ENA”?

“That’s certainly true of the 18 months you spend within the walls of ENA itself in Strasbourg, yes,” said my first source. “In the preparatory courses, you learn things. In the two six-month placements in France and abroad, you learn a great deal. But once you’re in Strasbourg, you are incessantly tested and, I would say, taught only that to succeed you must conform.”

The former student, who asked not to be named, was an atypical énarque, the only one in his year who came from a working-class family. “ENA was my dream from the age of 16,” he said. “It was the way I thought I could succeed in life. When I got there, I detested the place. Why? Because the whole ENA approach is detestable.”

After working for several years in government, he left to start his own business. My other informant still works in government but has started to build a political career for himself in the provinces because, he says, “being an énarque no longer helps you so much as all that”.

And so Macron’s decision is not the revolution that he claims — it is more like a recognition of changes that are already happening. Its replacement’s college will be housed in the same building and will have many of the same teachers. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that there will be only 40 students, not 80; hardly a sign that it will be more open.

How they will be selected is still unclear, possibly by high achievement in relation to their social background, rather than just by competitive exam. This approach has already been tried with some success at “Science-Po”, France’s “political university” which sends many of its graduates to ENA. The numbered classification will remain but the top 15 graduates will no longer enter the praetorian ranks of the state service directly. They will have to prove themselves in more lowly work for five years first.

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But will replacing the ENA alone help France to become the land of opportunity that Macron promises? Hardly. France has a baffling system of “first and second divisions” in higher education which will remain largely intact. State university courses, medicine and law apart, are inexpensive, easy to reach but extremely variable in quality. And clever students from well-off families aspire instead to go to a separate archipelago of state-run Grandes Ecoles, like Polytechnique, or to private, fee-paying business schools, like HEC. To reach them, two years of preparatory classes are needed.

Replacing ENA might remove the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. But for the great majority of French youngsters, the slopes to success will remain as forbiddingly steep as ever.

An honest look at history suggests otherwise. Our Prime Minister was born in the shadow of Britain’s ‘golden age’ of social mobility (though as an Etonian from a wealthy family, he is no advert for it). Children born between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s — those I call the golden generation — were more likely to climb the social ladder than any before or since: 40% of them ended up in a higher social class than their parents. Less than 20% descended to a lower class.

This era was dominated by the “self-made man”, who became a paperback hero and a box office hit. Joe Lampton, the protagonist of John Braine’s bestselling novel Room at the Top (1958), was archetypal: born “on the fringes of poverty” and determined to “fight his way up into the bright world of money and influence”. Before the Second World War, hailing from a working-class family had no cultural cachet. By the time the Beatles achieved fame in the early 1960s, hauling yourself up by your bootstraps was such a praiseworthy feat that the lads from Liverpool were often presented as fresh from the slums.

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In reality, the self-made man is a myth. He owed his chances to the Labour government of 1945, which established a welfare state and guaranteed full employment. The state poured money into nationalised industries or private firms focused on peacetime reconstruction, research and development. Such unprecedented investment allowed jobs associated with the middle and upper rungs of the social ladder to multiply. Ambitious young men (and a few women) became senior clerks, engineers, technicians, middle-managers and teachers.

Meanwhile, conditions were favourable for those inclined to take a risk. Take Alan Sugar. It’s hard to find a feature on the businessman, born in 1947, that doesn’t describe him as a “self-made man”. The son of a market trader, Sugar was the first in his family to take O’Levels. After that he went into the expanding civil service, where he got a training in economics that came in handy when he started his own retail business in the early 1970s. Rising wages (thanks to strong trade unions) meant Sugar had receptive customers for his electrical goods. It was in this climate that he amassed considerable capital — enough to take advantage of the stock market in the 1980s and become a millionaire.

The most seductive part of the self-made man myth was that anyone could become one, with enough persistence. But even in the golden age of social mobility, there was far less room at the top than at the bottom. By 1961 more than 1% of the population were migrants. Regardless of their skills and qualifications, most did the dirty, low-paid work that post-war reconstruction relied upon. As hospital porters and school dinner ladies they were essential to the welfare state. As office cleaners and canteen staff they helped manufacturing firms to thrive. Their labour enabled some white Britons to climb into more lucrative and congenial work as nurses, teachers and managers. It certainly wasn’t the case that the most talented were enjoying life on the highest rung, nor that only feckless idlers languished on the lowest.

Men were more likely to climb the ladder than women. For most working-class women, a step up the ladder meant becoming a secretary or a nurse. These jobs were very fulfilling for some, but they didn’t offer the salaries and prestige accrued by managers or university lecturers (occupations that employed a lot of upwardly mobile men). Women’s most likely source of professional work was teaching, which employed a staggering 70% of female graduates. Many were disappointed by their limited options.

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The war on social mobility

By James Kirkup

The experience of Maureen Thomas, born in Barnsley in 1941, is typical. The daughter of a miner, she grew up knowing that the welfare state and full employment offered her a very different future from that of her sister, Gillian, who was just seven years older. Gillian had left school at 14 and got a job in a shop round the corner from their parents’ home. Maureen “wanted a life…not loads of money, just a bit of freedom”. She did well at school and dreamed of getting a degree and a career in the arts. But less than 5% of Maureen’s generation could get a place at university, and places for girls were particularly limited. So Maureen became a teacher — “and hated it”.

Maureen is one of many upwardly mobile members of the golden generation whose testimonies are recorded in the Mass Observation Archive, which was established in 1937 to find out about everyday life in Britain (and re-established at the University of Sussex in the 1980s.) The Archive issues quarterly ‘directives’ to hundreds of volunteer writers, and in 2016 I worked with it to try and understand how the golden generation felt about social mobility. What I learned from the Mass Observers — and from a wide range of other interviewees and unpublished autobiographies — forms the backbone of my book, Snakes and Ladders.

The Mass Observers reveal that men’s success often relied on women’s hard work. Wives set aside their own ambitions to support husbands’ careers. Some took paid work to fund their spouse’s training for a profession. Managers’ wives were expected to entertain the boss who could determine their husband’s next promotion. A self-made man might boast of his working-class roots, but he expected his wife to assume the accent and appearance of a bourgeois housewife.

The self-made man would have been as reluctant to credit his mother with his fortunes as his wife. But in the mid-1950s the sociologist Jean Floud revealed that a mother’s education and ambitions were key in facilitating her child’s social mobility. Paul Vincent Baker, born in 1948 in a Coventry council house, is living proof. “I don’t very often own up to my middle name being Vincent,” Paul said, “but apparently at a very early stage she got this vision of me going to Oxford or Cambridge and becoming a barrister, and she thought that a double barrel name — Vincent-Baker — would sound quite nice.” Mrs Baker, Paul remembers, “was the driving force behind education all the time”. Like many mothers, she used her earnings — from her job as a part-time cashier in a works canteen — to buy her children books, and helped with their homework.

Paul Baker got to grammar school, but such golden opportunities were rationed. The Labour government of 1945 introduced free secondary education, but only 20% of children attended grammar school: Floud revealed that a disproportionately small minority of working-class children passed the all-important eleven plus exam to gain admittance. The majority attended secondary modern schools, which were poorly resourced and offered no education beyond the minimum leaving age. In the early 1950s, Ann Davies’ mother moved the family to a London suburb “for the good schools”, but Ann failed the eleven-plus — to her own and her mother’s disappointment. After she left her secondary modern at 15 she got a clerical job; her younger sister got into grammar school and then university.

Not only were children from wealthier families more likely to pass the eleven-plus, but they also had the resources to escape the consequences of failure. Roy Todd was the son of a Northumbrian farmer. He didn’t win a grammar school place, but his family could “afford to send me to a modest boarding school”. This “allowed me to gain seven O levels” and become a teacher. His mobility was hardly “self-made”.

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Still, mid-century meritocrats assumed that only a minority of the population had the ability to do skilled or professional work, or to benefit from advanced education. This opinion was espoused by successive governments (the Tories took over from Labour in 1951) and by the senior civil servants who helped shape reform. And yet those members of the golden generation who didn’t take the traditional route up the social ladder proved them wrong. By the 1960s, more people were in white-collar or professional jobs than had attended grammar schools. In the 1970s, women, who had so often been denied an academic secondary schooling, flocked to universities and polytechnics as mature students.

Pamela Thornton was among them. She had been born in 1943 to a working-class Lancashire family. A “bookworm” from an early age, Pamela was “very jealous” of those girls who passed the eleven-plus. She attended a secondary modern and left at 15 to become a bakery assistant. By 1973 she was married to a council clerk, had a young daughter starting nursery school and “was ready for a new challenge”. Her local further education college invited her to teach a baking class and she “loved it”. By the end of the decade, Pamela was teaching a number of evening classes; in 1981, her newfound confidence led her to answer a plea for help in establishing a library at her daughter’s new comprehensive school. With the school’s support, Pamela trained as a library assistant and took up a permanent job with the council-funded schools library service. State-funded education laid the path for Pamela’s satisfying career.

Meanwhile, many members of the golden generation recognised that their success wasn’t based on their own exceptional merit. Encouraged to dream of a better future, some didn’t want to hoard wealth and opportunity, and instead made concerted, wide-ranging efforts to make life better for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The 1970s was a good time for equality. Activists started law centres so people didn’t have to rely on costly solicitors. Feminists campaigns gained momentum. Trade union membership rocketed: by 1979, more than 13 million workers had signed up, many of them in white-collar or professional jobs. By the end of the decade, the gulf between the rich and poor was narrower than it had been since the Second World War, and legislation had been passed to outlaw sex and race discrimination. Working-class people’s participation in further and higher education was rapidly growing.

Of course, some of the golden generation voted for a very different future, electing Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of 1979. Thatcher promised to help people to help themselves, as unemployment rose in the late 1970s. She encouraged people to start their own businesses, buy their own homes, and go “into industry, into commerce, because that’s where the money is made”. But by looking behind the social mobility statistics, we can learn a lot from the golden generation about how to handle the pandemic and its aftermath.

History shows that, given the chance, most people are capable of contributing a great deal to society. Building back better means enabling them to do so. Education should emphasise creativity and co-operation rather than competition or conformity. Instead of bailing out bankers and millionaires, we should provide a safety net that gives everyone a secure foundation on which to build. And Government can create more room at the top. There is no objective reason why care work should not be a profession, why teachers and nurses should not be paid more for their valuable work, and why we can’t have a strong welfare state. Investing in people encourages the hard work of innovation, and generates more opportunities for future generations. ‘Success’ does not have to mean accruing enormous personal wealth. It certainly didn’t for most of the golden generation.

When I ran social mobility charities, I would watch professional service firms and banks fall over themselves to hire black graduates if they were privately educated and from professional families. These young people were deemed to have the requisite social capital they claimed their “clients expect from us”. If, however, you were the sort of black young person my organisations typically helped – poor and from a council estate – enthusiasm waned.

Countless companies in my experience would talk much on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background did not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white so long as you were suitably middle class. I think this points to a real problem in the UK. And it is just one example of why I think when we talk about race, we also need to talk about class.

I wasn’t surprised the George Floyd protests hit the British streets. The 2017 Race Disparity Audit showed that the average custodial sentence for a white person was 18 months compared with 26-27 months if you were black or Asian. Only 20% of those who were black African owned their own home compared with 68% of those who were white British. And the average hourly pay was £11.87 if you were white British and £9.62 if you were Pakistani or Bangladeshi.

The trouble is, the public debate on race until now hasn’t focused on these details. Among people and politicians alike it has been depressingly one dimensional, focused on symbols rather than substance. Symbols matter, but if we tear down every statue, ban every word or song that is said to cause offence and clear our museums of any artefacts deemed problematic — would any of those disparities close?

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Watch closely, and you’ll see a lot of the desire to focus on symbols tends comes from those who are affluent and white, rather than from those in whose name they claim to speak. When these same people make decisions about where they live, where they send their children to school and whom they employ, they don’t often go out of their way to seek people who are different from themselves. Since they aren’t really seeking to spread opportunity, what they’re doing feels more like empty posturing.

At my charities, we did encourage employers to spread opportunity. Some firms struggled: “Our clients need us to have worldliness and you get that by travelling the world. So how will the young people you work with be able to demonstrate it?” This was a genuine enquiry from someone who did want to work with us. Skin colour didn’t matter, but background certainly did.

Then there was the offer of work experience from another firm that came with the warning: “They’ll be alongside the children of high net-worth individuals who we’re teaching how to invest the assets their parents gave them, so you’ll have to send us someone suitable”. Most of the people we helped were eligible for Free School Meals. It was like she lived on a different planet.

This is why I think that when we talk about opportunity, we also have to talk about class. Having been born on a council estate, I understand only too well the part that background — as well as race — can play in stymieing potential. We see it when only 6% of doctors and barristers are from a working-class background and only 12% of journalists and chief executives are. Or when the Civil Service Fast Stream was forced to turn its attention to social background because only 3.6% of its intake was working-class.

Anywhere from 40% to 70% of our leading institutions’ intakes were educated privately, even though only 7% of the country is. At the BBC, 60% of staff come from professional families, at Channel 4 only 9% of staff come from a working-class background. Employers are starting to realise it is a problem, but progress is often slow.

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It is an environment that affects ethnic minorities and the working-class; many of the former are also in the latter. If you are male or female, white, black or Asian and from a poor background, it is more difficult for you to get to where you want to. When it comes to ‘white privilege’ you will have a hard job persuading me that a black public-school boy has had less ‘privilege’ than a white boy from a council estate, even though the former will doubtless have experienced racism and the latter will almost certainly not have done.

White working-class boys have been neglected. They have been doing worst in secondary education with lower results than almost any other group. For some time they have been less likely to go to university than ethnic minorities. But while some commentators seize on these facts to suggest the white working-class should be our focus instead of the progress made by ethnic minorities, I say we need to focus on both.

The unemployment rate in March was 8% if you were black, Bangladeshi or Pakistani and 3% if you were white. Our elite banks, law firms and consultancies like to quote what proportion of their staff are black and minority ethnic, but they frequently employ so few black people outside their clerical and cleaning staff they could almost remove the ‘B’ from BAME – their figures have traditionally been a measure of how many middle class Indian and Chinese staff they have. While 21% of all lawyers are BAME, 15% are Asian and only 3% are Black.

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Representation matters greatly. It is important that ethnic minorities are represented at all levels in our country’s organisations, however privileged their backgrounds: it matters that two of the four great offices of state in the current government are held by ethnic minorities. But class matters too.

Right now, we’re being encouraged by commentators on the Left to think if someone is white and isn’t chanting incantations about what a privileged racist they are, they must be, well, racist. The response from a small group of commentators on the Right is that if they aren’t saying white working-class boys are the UK’s main problem, they must be woke. The rest of us in the middle wonder whether we should say anything at all, but in the middle is in fact a huge space for nuance.

I know that in 2020, nuance is treated much like Covid: ideally you stay locked away where it can’t get near you, but if you do venture out you must keep cleaning yourself to make sure you don’t develop symptoms of being infected by it. But hear me out.

Black Caribbean children still have the lowest GCSE attainment of any main ethnic group, but if you include household income they are replaced by white boys. Why aren’t we debating what to do about both? If you’re bright and poor in London, you’re far more likely to go to university than if you’re bright and poor in the North-East. Why are we ignoring that? Where is the energy to help ethnic minorities and those with less advantaged backgrounds to occupy leadership positions? It is going on whether or not we should replace the word ‘Empire’ in the Honours system.

The choice we all face is not between caring about ethnic minorities or caring about the white working class, nor is it a choice to be either racist or woke. It is a choice about whether we put our efforts into improving the life chances of all people or just argue over symbols, instead. The Conservatives need to focus on providing the education and employment opportunities that allow everyone, whatever family they’re born into, to pursue the life they want to – and leave the Left to squabble over what they want to Tipp-Ex out.

These, at least, are just some of the suggestions offered by the various ‘classy/trashy’ listicle memes that have periodically surfaced on social media ever since the New Zealand columnist Ana Samways sought advice on the subject from Twitter in 2016. One conclusion might be that the rich and the poor are unexpectedly similar, at least when it comes to their preferred pursuits (indiscriminate shagging, boozing, lazing about), the only difference being how these indulgences are regarded by society.

There will of course be local variations to this. I’m no expert on the codes that dictate class (or lack thereof) in the smarter post-codes of Wellington, NZ, but the idea does echo a concept long familiar in the British media, that the upper classes and the lower classes have a good deal common when it comes to knowing how to have a good time, largely because they aren’t hobbled by the guilt and social ambition that besets the middle classes, for whom fun is never the point.

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I’ve even witnessed this trope in real life, in my very own sitting room. My father was a working-class boy from Bromley who left school at 14 to take up a hairdressing apprenticeship at a Mayfair salon. He was good looking and good with an up-do. He rose fast, and always said that being hairdresser meant that he could get on with anyone “from a dustman to a duke”; but it wasn’t the dustmen who turned him on to drugs in the 1970s, it was the posh kids he met at clubs like Sybilla’s and the Aretusa.

Dad started taking heroin, and then he started selling it. To aristocrats. By the time he was in his mid-thirties and I was not yet ten the hairdressing wasn’t going so well (junkies and day-jobs don’t mix) so the dealing was paying the bills. Which meant every night Chelsea’s loucher denizens would find their way across the river to our mansion flat in Battersea to buy drugs, while I performed ancillary services like refilling wineglasses and so on. The denizens usually couldn’t be bothered to go back home to sample their purchases, so stayed at ours, sometimes all night. I would often find a stoned marquess passed out on the carpet when I got up for my morning Rice Krispies (scooped direct from the packet into my mouth).

They seemed to have so much in common, my dad and these men who had been educated at Eton and would one day inherit castles. They dressed the same, liked the same music, could stay up all night chatting. We were even invited to Jamie Blandford’s wedding at Blenheim Castle. So classy! (For us at least, probably quite trashy that the future Duke of Marlborough invited his dealer, and his dealer’s daughter, to his wedding).

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My dad may have been a drug-dealing hairdresser, and my mum an alcoholic model from Wanstead, but I got in to a posh school, followed by a posh university, which led ultimately to a posh job, as deputy editor of Tatler where I got to witness, first hand the way these posh/not posh lists are created by the publications that position themselves as the ultimate arbiter of such things. There is no science to these lists, no research, they are made up. I remember one amusing Christmas features meeting in which we brain-stormed the list of the poshest baby names for 2017. The aim was to make them absurd as possible — Quail, Ra, Gethsemene, Npeter (with a silent n) — but also to include a few ‘normal’ names — David, John, Kenneth — for the veneer of veracity. The joke was on the people who took these lists seriously.

Because it’s all just banter, isn’t it, this taxonomy of rich/poor, classy/trashy, posh/not. The genre finds its acme in Nicky Haslam and his ‘Common Crimes’ tea-towel. Most of the things Haslam finds common are things that most people (in their stolid middle-class befuddlement) might think were posh — Farrow and Ball, Henley, knighthoods and sorbet. The snobbish reverse logic is the point. Things that were posh are now common because the mercurial posh people have now moved on, and you will never be able to keep up. You don’t find this funny? How dull.

These codifications of rich and poor, masquerading as harmless fun, on social media, in magazines, on tea-towels, serve only to reaffirm the privilege of the privileged. Classy/trashy tells us that even the shoddiest behaviour looks glittery with enough cash and the poor can’t get away with anything. Posh/not posh lists only serve to maintain the line separating the upper classes from all the other classes. And the idea that uppers and lowers have so much in common is ridiculous. My dad always knew that the relationship he had with the landed junkies was transactional, he always knew his place, as did they. And their parents never had to sell cocaine to pay the school fees.

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That is not to say that culture cannot say something interesting about class. When I was growing up my favourite film was Trading Places, in which two mean millionaire grandpas try to resolve a dispute about the differences/similarities between the rich and the poor. They did this by switching the lives of a Wasp banker and a street hustler. Humanity wins the bet and the characters who occupy the moral high ground are a butler and a prostitute.

In my twenties the song Common People by Pulp offered a brilliantly elegant narrative appraisal of the transactional relationship between the classes, and of how things look so very different depending on your perspective. It is all too easy for the upper classes to make tourist forays into the lives of the lower classes, and jump to assumptions about their similarities, but the fundamental difference is that for the loaded girl in the cockroach-infested flat, it’s all a game, which she can step out of at any moment.

In The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst meticulously observes the opaque sign-postings of privilege; how in certain worlds every choice you make — furnishings, food, phrases — advertises whether you belong or not, and how impossible it is to get it right if you are not already accepted. The moralities in the book are muddy, but that is a truer reflection of real life than the binary lists that currently populate culture.

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By Fiona Sturges

We no longer live in a time of high social mobility. What made the difference to my life was education. After my dad went bankrupt and left my mum for a girl my own age, I was offered an assisted place so I could stay at my school and do my A-levels. Assisted places were abolished by Tony Blair’s government in 1997. When I went to Cambridge I did not have to pay fees, because these would not be introduced until 1998; and I was eligible for a maintenance grant from my local council, which were abolished in 1999, reintroduced in 2006 and abolished again in 2015. I left university with a very small amount of debt, which allowed me to take unpaid internships, and ultimately get a job in the industry that I was interested in. The experience of graduates who do not come from wealthy backgrounds today is very different.

But this is not just about someone like me being able to study classics at Cambridge, or about getting a job in an industry that is difficult to access without the right credentials and contacts. There are more fundamental issues at stake. The decrease in social mobility is illustrated by growing health inequalities — in the least-deprived areas a person can expect to live 19 years longer than someone in the most deprived areas. And this is a situation that the Covid-19 pandemic is making more perilous. Those gaps that people on the edge of their economic capacity can fall through are getting wider and wider.

Let’s not make this all seem OK by reducing disadvantage to a pithy listicle. We need to remember that these are individuals and not just cultural clichés. We need to care about inequality and not just laugh it off.

My own new book, Head, Hand, Heart, shares some of this critique, but my complaint is more that the type of merit that the modern meritocracy favours has been too narrowly focused on Head/cognitive ability. In order to shift more prestige and reward to the relatively neglected Hand and Heart aptitudes, we may, paradoxically, require more meritocracy in those spheres.

And while all of these books critique the principle, none of them really answers the question: if it is not merit that determines the allocation of reward and status, then what does?

Most mainstream politicians in developed democracies remain firmly wedded to the idea of meritocracy. It seems, after all, to combine fairness — rewarding people according to their abilities, not their family connections — and efficiency — getting the right people into the appropriate top jobs for the benefit of society as a whole. Moreover, it is easy and objective to measure through exams and related tests, or at least appears to be so.

Partly for those reasons, it was the moderate Left that first took up the banner of meritocracy and equality of opportunity in the 1980s and 1990s. It challenged undeserved privilege while avoiding the unattainable, and unpopular, goal of socialist transformation and equality of outcome and provided a story for the moderate Left at a time when it was conceding much of the economic argument to the Right. Meritocracy, it might be said, was a substitute for socialism when the latter seemed unviable.

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The war on social mobility

By James Kirkup

Thatcherites didn’t talk about meritocracy so much but practised it, including in the Tory party itself where the estate agents were taking over from the grandees with estates. By the Major years, and even more for Cameron modernisers, meritocracy and equality of opportunity had become part of political common sense for Tories too. A new political consensus had been born.

Much of the intellectual Left, including in the UK, has now discarded the meritocracy banner. It is not hard to see why. It has been in the ascendancy as a political idea at a time when income inequality, especially in the US, has been reaching grotesque levels and social mobility seems to have slowed or even stalled. Meritocracy, by allowing a few people from disadvantaged homes to climb the ladder, stands accused of providing a fig leaf of legitimacy to old and new unfairnesses.

In the US, of those born in the lowest 20% of the income spectrum, only 5% make it to the top 20%. Meanwhile, more students from families in the top 1% of the income spectrum attend Ivy League universities than students from the whole of the bottom 50%. It is a similar story in the UK with those from the richest 20% of families seven times more likely to attend a Russell Group university than those from the bottom 40%.

Moreover, our experience with partial meritocracies has focused attention on just how hard it is to establish meaningful ones. In a free society that allows parents to pass on advantage to their children they will do so, and even without the extra leg-up of private education that will often be decisive in shaping life chances. As Polly Mackenzie puts it: “There are endless debates about whether ability comes from our genes, or the environment in which we are raised. It doesn’t matter… My parents gave me my genes and they gave me my childhood.”

So meritocracy can quickly ossify into a kind of oligarchy. Even if you don’t mind the tyranny of the talented, just wait, it will become the tyranny of the talented’s children, as American philosopher Tim Sommers pithily puts it.

The apparent impossibly of anything but a partial and flawed meritocracy has switched attention to the undesirability of the very principle itself. Much of the recent critique draws on the work of the pioneer meritocracy sceptic Michael Young, a socialist and one of the authors of the 1945 Labour manifesto. Young did not like meritocracy partly for simple egalitarian reasons: he did not like any inequality of reward and status whether based on merit or inheritance or anything else.

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Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

Michael Sandel is not a socialist but his book The Tyranny of Merit shares Young’s dismay at the idea that where we stand in the social pecking order is fair because it is merited. This can create despair among the losers, especially in modern secular societies which have eroded traditional meaning-generating social roles and religious consolation. And it can create hubris among the winners who believe their high status is deserved, ignoring both the luck and the social infrastructure that underpins their success.

Michael Young’s son Toby (who was a pupil of Sandel’s in his youth) takes a different view. “I like meritocracy for the same reason that my father disapproved of it: because it helps to secure peoples’ consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government. I say this not as someone fond of inequality but as someone who believes limited government is preferable to a large coercive state.” Meritocracy does this by helping to create wealthy, dynamic societies; by allocating reward in a way that at least seems fairer than the alternatives; and by creating opportunities for some of those born on the wrong side of the tracks.

We meritocracy sceptics have to acknowledge that Young junior is still winning this argument, the meritocracy critique remains more persuasive in the seminar room than in the cauldron of modern politics. When I say to people that turning society into a competition that the most able win and the majority lose is a recipe for creating populist resentment, most people readily agree. Most people also accept the general egalitarian/Christian sense that all humans are of equal moral worth which ultimately underpins the meritocratic critique.

But these vague sentiments do not translate into practical policy ideas beyond the familiar notion that we should tax the rich, push minimum wages as high as possible and respect essential workers, even if low skilled, as we did in the early days of the pandemic.

The issue is this: there will always be hierarchies of competence and ability and those will tend to generate related hierarchies of both status and income. We can (and do) mitigate the latter but it is much harder to do something about the former. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has eloquently put it: “The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur.”

It is not in the gift of politicians to control the distribution of status, beyond some nudging at the margins, and when they have tried to do so and claimed to be implementing Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” it has not turned out well.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

Moreover, nobody, not even Michael Young, really objects to the principle of meritocratic selection for jobs, particularly the most important ones. We want our best nuclear physicists to be in charge of our nuclear research programme; it is not something that can be chosen by lottery. And who wants to be operated on by a surgeon who failed their exams? So, the puzzled voter might ask, “you want meritocracy for jobs, but you don’t want a meritocratic society, how does that work?”.

It is a subtle distinction but a real one, somewhat akin to Lionel Jospin’s wanting a market economy but not a market society. And the key word is want. The minimum that meritocracy critics require is an acknowledgement of what Sandel calls the “dark side” of meritocracy, that it is a pragmatic labour market principle not an ideal for the good society. The reward to merit should be balanced by other principles such as the equal moral worth of all citizens and an awareness of the fact that merit is generated by society, through family, education and so on, as well as by the individual. (Listen to Yascha Mounk’s excellent interview with Sandel on his The Good Fight podcast.)

This, however, does not produce an especially distinctive politics for meritocracy critics, beyond a mild form of social democracy. My own approach in Head, Hand, Heart offers an alternative with more traction. I argue that the problem is not so much meritocracy itself, though the principle deserves a proper scepticism, but rather the rise and rise of the cognitive meritocracy in recent decades. This has over-promoted one form of human aptitude. The political task is to try to spread some of the reward and status hoarded by the cognitively blessed to those with aptitudes related to Hand (technical and craft) and Heart (caring and emotional intelligence). It is a call for a wider understanding of what constitutes merit and indeed skill.

The cognitive takeover of the past 40 years has been actively promoted by public policy and has now become dysfunctional. It has created too narrow a definition of a successful life: do well at school, go to a good university and into a decent professional job. It has also, with the expansion of higher education driven forward by Tony Blair, created a single ladder up to safety and success through the modern university. There used to be many more little ladders up and more promotion from below in big organisations, now around 40% of jobs are graduate-only.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklyn

So, the answer is not so much to suppress the idea of meritocracy — which remains the worst system for allocating reward apart from all the others — but to spread it more widely. This is easier said than done. Non-cognitive forms of merit in craft or care are often harder to quantify. As Madeleine Bunting points out in her new book Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care the containment of pain and distress is elusive and hard to measure, and care is usually embodied work in a culture dominated by the abstract and analytical.

And we typically apply cognitive criteria even in non-cognitive fields. If you ask an economist why people working in care homes are so poorly paid he or she will say because anyone can do it. But that is just saying that minimal qualifications are required. Anyone who has worked in a hospital or care home, or even visited one, knows that there are good carers, middling ones and poor ones, as in other areas of life. Yet we often lack the meritocratic selection mechanisms for distinguishing and rewarding them.

The ‘spreading rather than suppressing’ approach to meritocracy now has history on its side. For we are reaching Peak Head. The knowledge economy doesn’t need as many knowledge workers as had been assumed, and AI is increasingly coming for the middling and lower cognitive jobs. Education policy, social mobility policy and even economic policy in the UK have all been partly premised on the idea of an ever expanding cognitive-professional class of graduates. But in recent years this has slowed to a crawl: in 2000, the proportion of the workforce in the top two social classes in the UK was 35%, today it is 37%.

Higher education is still pumping out graduates while the graduate premium is less than 10% for the majority of men (once you control for education differences prior to college) and more than one third of graduates are not in graduate jobs more than five years after graduating. This is creating a crisis of expectations which may lie behind both the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn eruptions. Meanwhile there are recruitment crises in nursing, care homes, skilled trades and middling technical functions.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Ian Birrell

Much of the expansion of the cognitive meritocracy was necessary at the time. And it is far better to have a mass graduate elite of one third of the population than the much narrower elite when I went to college. But no thought ever seems to have been given to what I call the 15/50 problem, meaning when 15% of your school peers go to college and you don’t it is not a big deal, when nearly half go and you don’t it is a different matter.

This is not, of course, an argument against the importance of intelligence and knowledge in our society both for individuals and for a post Brexit Britain that must remain a global centre of education, science and innovation. But we have got things out of kilter. The mass knowledge economy jobs are going and the future is likely tilt more towards care, coding and craft. The idea that a majority of people would be taking up prestigious professional jobs requiring analytical intelligence and delivering a sense of purpose and even self-expression, is not going to happen. Most people still regard work as just a means of earning a living and get their sense of meaning and self-expression away from work. This may apply to even more of us in the future.

Nietzsche spotted a long time ago that the idea of democratic equality runs up against the reality of big variations in human ability and that democracy would thus find it hard to escape a plague of mass resentment. It has done pretty well so far, at least since the Second World War. But if mass resentment is not to make a reappearance, people need to feel respected and useful. That in turn requires a better spread of reward and status across those three clusters of aptitude relating to Head, Hand and Heart. Democracy is now demanding it.

Head, Hand, Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century is published by Allen Lane

The bicycle is not only a clean, healthy, enjoyable, and efficient mode of transport: it has also played a key role in the emancipation of women. One of the founders of the American feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony, said in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel — the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”

The bicycle, as we now know the basic design, came into availability in the 1880s — the earlier bikes, like the penny-farthing, were uncomfortable and impractical. Up to the 1890s, according to Ray Strachey in her renowned history of the women’s movement, The Cause, it was not generally accepted for respectable woman to move about freely. It was the advent of the bicycle that liberated these late-Victorian girls, and virtually ushered in H.G. Wells’ “New Woman” for the turn of the century, (and the Suffrage campaign which subsequently arose.)

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But “the women who first began to ride upon this queer machine were thought to be incredibly adventurous, and most people also thought them shocking,” wrote Strachey. Only men’s bikes were available at the beginning, she recalled, and the early female pioneers were hooted at in the street, since they were often wearing “Bloomers”. These were the loose-fitting knee-length garments, like oversize knickers, invented by Amelia Bloomer, as an alternative to the crinoline and the bustle.

But whatever they wore, these bright young women thought the bicycle a stupendously good thing. Not only did they discover “the exquisite pleasure of rapid motion”, but the possession of a bicycle meant “they were no longer prisoners in their own houses”. They could “spin off” wherever they liked, assert their independence, gratified by the knowledge that they only “relied upon their own muscle”.

Still, bicycles were quite expensive at first, and such intrepid women bikers were usually from more affluent backgrounds. You don’t see archive photos or illustrations of women from mines or mill-towns riding bicycles until much later. My Edwardian uncle, born in 1908, recounted how the bike became cheaper after the end of the First World War: by 1920, you could buy a bike for just over a quid — he paid a guinea (£1 and a shilling) for his, in the mid-1920s, although admittedly that still represented a week’s wages for some working men.

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Two wheels good; four wheels bad

By Peter Franklin

The bike also started to play a role in changing courtship habits. Before bicycles were avaialable, matches and marriages were often made within the radius of a community, or however far a couple could walk. This restricted the gene pool, and shared kinship was frequently quite high in village schools The bicycle enabled a healthy young man to cycle 50 or 60 miles to meet a more distant sweetheart (although girls rode bicycles, males were still expecting to do the courting.)

By mid-20^th century, the motor-car had reduced the status of the bicycle. It had been much-used, of course, during the Second World War, but subsequently relegated, somewhat, to the proletarian of the transportation world. In movies, poor Italians rode bicycles, while young Americans had fabulous cars with tail fins, à la James Dean.

But the bike has always had its fans, and it has always been invoked when petrol scarcity occurred. And that’s just what happened during the French students’ rebellion in May 1968. Due to nationwide strikes, there was a severe shortage of petrol all over the country, and public transport, as well as much car travel, ground to a halt. I was a reporter on the London Evening Standard at the time, and the Editor, Charles Wintour (father of the now more famous Dame Anna) took it into his head to despatch me to Paris, from London, on a bicycle. So off I went.

I look back now on the extreme informality with which all this was arranged. Health and safety wasn’t mentioned. There were, of course, no mobile phones — I had to find public phone boxes en route to transmit my reports. I didn’t possess anything as fancy as a cycle helmet. Neither did I actually own a bike: I just hired one from a Clerkenwell bike shop. Some French money was provided by the Beaverbrook accounts department, I bought myself a couple of maps and I set off for the Dover Road.

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I crossed to Calais, and rode towards Paris, via Montreuil, Amiens and Beauvais. It was a glorious May and the countryside was exhilarating. There were adventures: I encountered a couple who had sheltered a British airman during the Second World War, struck up a helpful conversation with a woman in Beauvais and was pursued through a dark copse by a Frenchman in a fast car, probably with a little light rape in mind — how did he get the petrol to drive? — but I somehow gave him the slip. Paris was in full revolutionary mode when I arrived, in the traditional manner of the French exuberantly taking to the streets. My most vivid memory was that the students were burning down the stock exchange — La Bourse — declaring the end of capitalism. I was 24 and thought it all terrifically exciting.

Then I joined Wintour and some other Brits at the Crillon Hotel for drinks and dear Robin Day made a gentlemanly pass. Then I was ordered to ride all the way back again. Which I did.

That bike was a modest little number, but it behaved robustly, across cobblestones and rough roads, sometimes traversing motorways briefly. I don’t remember any punctures, or problems with the chain.

Looking back, however, I’m alarmed at how under-equipped I was, and how casually I embarked on the assignment. (I’m even more alarmed to remember that I sometimes halted for lunch at some cosy bistrot and drank a good half-bottle of wine with the repast, without thinking twice about the consequences.)

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I’m glad that a younger generation today has much better facilities for cycling — cycle lanes and paths, adapted clothing and shoes, Google maps, and a more serious approach to the whole endeavour. It’s upsetting to read of the deaths of cyclists, who can be vulnerable in heavy traffic — people should be able to cycle in safety. Every city should try to look more like Amsterdam and Copenhagen for cyclists, and post-Covid, I believe many more will do so. The cleaner air of the traffic-free (or traffic-lessened) roads has also been a source of great bicycling encouragement.

And I can see the bike going from strength to strenth: a boom in electric bikes, which are getting cheaper all the time, and are terrific for older people. There’s something else I notice that seems rather enticing for the, ahem, senior citizen (“soixante-huitards” — 1968ers, as the French call our generation) and that is the adult tricycle. They look amazingly jolly, and that road to Dover, and maybe even Calais, seems really quite inviting on a trike.

During the period of lockdown, the feeling of being “imprisoned in one’s own home” — like those frustrated Victorian ladies — has sometimes been a little overwhelming. The bicycle is just the thing to set the people free.

I don’t mean that it’s getting hard for people to advance up the socio-economic scale — to end up richer and more secure than their parents. That may well be true, but it isn’t new. What’s new is politicians and thinkers rejecting the very idea of social mobility.

Here’s Corbyn, one Saturday in June this year:

“Social mobility has failed, even on its own terms. The idea that only a few talented or lucky people deserve to escape the disadvantage they were born in to, leaving in place a social hierarchy in which millions are consigned to the scrap heap, results in the talents of millions of children being squandered.”

A Corbyn Labour government, the leader announced, would scrap the Government’s Social Mobility Commission — once led by Labour’s Alan Milburn — and replace it with a “Social Justice Commission” with a remit to audit all government policies to ensure they promote that as-yet-undefined goal of social justice.

“Social mobility helps just a lucky few to move up the social hierarchy, whilst leaving the hierarchy of entrenched inequality and disadvantage firmly still in place,” Labour says.

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

The Corbyn Project has always attracted some surprising admirers — remember when Jim O’Neill, formerly of Goldman Sachs and the Coalition ministry endorsed it? — but Yale Law School is still an unlikely place to look for fans. Yet Yale is the base of Daniel Markovits, author of a book that seeks to offer some intellectual foundations to the attack on social mobility and a meritocratic society. It’s called The Meritocracy Trap and while it’s ultimately not very good, it does deserve some attention.

Markovits, who praises Corbyn as a “reformer”, wants to make a similar challenge. He argues that the idea of a meritocratic society is the root of just about every social and economic ill suffered by Western nations today. For him, the guiding principle that people should rise to a socio-economic station according to their talent and industry is a recipe for inequality and misery.

The Meritocracy Trap is a remarkable book in several ways, few of them good. It is remarkable that a work so inconsistent and ultimately unconvincing should have become one of those “books of the moment” that “everyone” (i.e. some journalists and politicians) is talking about.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book on meritocracy is how hazily it defines that term. Often, when Markovits says “meritocracy” he appears to means “the general state of the US economy”; despite his repeated claims, he does not convincingly demonstrate that inequalities of wages and wealth are solely explained by the idea that people should be rewarded according to their talents.

Still, when he aims for easier targets, he has some success. Drawing usefully on his own experience at Yale educating the next generation of America’s legal elite (he appears to both pity and scorn his students), Markovits does a good job of describing the way educational and thus economic advantage have effectively become hereditary. He tells a good story of successful professionals whose salaries and lifestyles are ever more distant from those of “ordinary workers” and how they pay and push to get their kids every possible advantage and thus capture high-paying jobs of their own. The kids of those “ordinary workers” thus find it ever harder to climb the ladder that meritocracy implies they should have access to.

But Markovits is hardly the first to make these observations. It is almost suspiciously notable that he makes no reference to Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves, a much better book from 2017 that sets out how successful middle-class parents put a floor under their children’s prospects by getting them the best possible schooling and upbringing.

In a British context, The Class Ceiling by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison is a better challenge to the narrow idea of meritocracy as meaning your exam results decide your final income, demonstrating that your class background doesn’t just influence your chances of entering the privileged professional elite but your chances of progressing within it.

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By Peter Franklin

More original is Markovits’ portrait of that high-earning “superordinate” worker class as suffering its own captivity and misery: Markovits invites us to pity those who make it through super-pressured educational careers and elite schools like his own to become corporate lawyers and investment bankers only to find themselves trapped in a long-hours culture. And perhaps doing 90-hour weeks to fund school fees and a place in the Hamptons isn’t paradise, but Markovits doesn’t give much time to the fact that his suffering superordinates are ultimately free to quit and do something else, like move to the low-wage “left behind” places whose lack of growth and economic opportunity he fairly describes.

Is stagnant social mobility and the seeming impossibility of moving up the wage ladder for many people, especially poor white people, a grievance expressed in votes for Donald Trump and Brexit? This is not the place for a full answer, but Markovits deserves credit for exploring the possibility. Progessive politicians seeking to win back the support of Trump voters and Brexiteers would do well to do the same.

Here it should be noted that challenges to the notion of social mobility do not come only from the progressive Left. In a recent Centre for Social Justice report, the Conservative MP Sir John Hayes suggests that the drive to social mobility is at odds with the notion of community: uprooting bright children from their home towns to attend far-off universities then work in the high-wage south-east of England is a source of harmful tension, he argues.

If anything, this underestimates the magnitude of the issue here: it is the difference in worldview between those who go away to graduate and those who stay at home without getting a degree that increasingly dominates our politics, though few politicians are yet willing to accept that.

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I think that CSJ critique conflates social and geographical mobility; the answer to the problem Sir John diagnoses is a familiar prescription of economic rebalancing, industrial strategy and investment in skills and education. It should be possible to enjoy social mobility and climb at least a few rungs on that ladder without ever leaving your home town; there’s no automatic reason that attaining a degree should distance your values and worldview from your peers who don’t go to university.

Markovits, meanwhile, makes a much bigger and more culpable leap of logic. Having — reasonably — observed that some Bad Things are happening in societies that say they value meritocracy, he concludes that meritocracy is itself a Bad Thing. This is, of course, in keeping with the political spirit of our times: when democratic votes produce outcomes we do not like, it’s becoming common to question the system, not the outcome; when markets allocate resources in ways we regret, people like Corbyn conclude that markets themselves must be swept away. As it is with consumer goods, so it is with economic and political principles: instead of fixing something when it doesn’t work properly for us, we throw it away and get a new model.

This is Markovits’ approach, yet for a book demanding a fundamental reordering of societies and economies, it is stunningly light on detailed recommendations for action; Team Corbyn will find few new policies here.

There’s some perfectly sensible, familiar stuff about pushing private schools and top universities to admit more poor kids, and to create more places to accommodate them, but anyone who thinks letting a few more hundred poor kids go to Yale or Oxford will solve this puzzle simply isn’t serious.

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If some of his proposals are too small, some are far too grand. After nearly 300 pages and as many footnotes describing his chosen problem, he reels off, in a few sentences, prescriptions that amount to an entire new understanding of economics.

“The most direct way to promote middle-class labour is to promote ways of making goods and services that favour middle-class workers,” he says, without bothering to explain how this could be done, by whom, and what the very considerable consequences would be. Likewise his plan to turn back the clock on work and jobs and reverse decades of increasing human capital and productivity: instead of prioritising ever-higher skills, “a second reform should use taxes to encourage employers to create mid-skilled jobs.”

Rejecting the specialisation and comparative advantage described by Adam Smith and David Ricardo is, to put it mildly, a novel approach to economics, but Markovits is a philosopher not an economist, so we might infer that he thinks some things are more important than economic growth.

That inference is bolstered by his conclusions:

“Society must reduce the differences in pay among jobs and the differences in quality among schools and universities.

“True equality …cannot settle for meritocratic opportunities but must reach, democratically, towards outcomes.”

In short, the notion that human and financial capital gravitates to uses where it generates the highest return — wages or profits — has failed and must be replaced by some other system of allocation. Quite who and what should determine what “equal outcomes” look like is not explained or explored. Nor is there any reflection on the role of incentives.

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It’s hard not to read this as an argument that Markovits wants less aggregate wealth more evenly distributed. Which is not an illegitimate argument, but it is one that requires far more exposition than it gets here.

If Markovits had stuck to the task of breaking the tightening middle-class stranglehold on wealth and high-wage jobs, he’d have done something useful to improve the system. Instead, he wants to smash the whole system down, with little idea of what might replace it.

Which of course brings us back to Jeremy Corbyn and his Social Justice Commission, an organisation promised without any obvious attempt by the Labour leader to define the “social justice” that must replace “social mobility” as a goal of policy.

Is that ambiguity deliberate? An undefined mission could potentially give that new Commission — based in the Cabinet Office — huge scope to roam Whitehall and the public sector, enforcing the will of the centre on all economic and social policy. At a time when many watchers of politics fixate on Labour’s utterances about nationalisation and state provision, I’d suggest the Social Justice Commission deserves more attention too.

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Away from Whitehall, what would replacing “social mobility” with “social justice” mean for people and their lives? Well, standing alongside Jeremy Corbyn at that event in June was Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary who is one of the most consistently under-estimated politicians in Westminster.

Unlike her leader, Rayner did offer to define “social justice” — as “not one person doing better than the people they grew up with but all of us working together to give everyone the chance to reach their full potential”.

She left unanswered the question of whether everyone has different potential outcomes and therefore delivering social justice will mean that people who start out in the same place might end up with different outcomes, because they did different things and made different choices.

Social mobility is dead. Long live social mobility?

This approach manages to coexist with the overwhelming evidence that cognitive ability — human intelligence — has a significant heritable component. We are not blank slates, at least not when it comes to our ability to think, yet while the evidence is overwhelming — see here, here and here — the Left, in particular, is hostile to the idea, or even discussing it.

The reason, at least on the surface, is well-intentioned. Progressives can say, with some justice, that categorising people by intelligence is an ethical nightmare. The use of epistocracy – government by the clever – to justify everything from the oppression of women to slavery goes all the way back to Aristotle. It is no coincidence that “intelligence testing” and eugenics emerged at the same moment. Indeed, the history and validity of measuring and testing “intelligence” is itself fraught with controversy.

But in seeking to push back against narratives that could be used to encourage bigotry, the Left has blinded itself to the biggest contemporary inequality story of all: the emergence of a new cognitive elite.

Consider ‘John’. Our hypothetical John is a poster boy for social mobility: born amid the industrial decline of a post-industrial community, to working-class parents, he did well at school and won a scholarship to a top university. John did not go back home, but instead moved to a flourishing global city for a career in financial services. He married another high flyer, and they live a middle-class life in a leafy suburb.

John could be British or American, Canadian or Australian. He has counterparts — Jean, Hans, Gianni — in many other countries. His story is a textbook case of meritocracy in action, rewarding the determination, hard work and natural ability of someone from a working-class background with a successful career in a field far removed from that of his parents.

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His story is also a parable of what in human genetics is called “assortative mating“: the tendency of people to pair up with partners of a similar social status. A 2017 paper that studied assortative mating in humans found, among other factors, a strong correlation between the educational attainment levels of life partners. If we take educational attainment as a rough proxy for cognitive ability, we can infer from this paper that assortative mating will result in couples of a similar intelligence.

It is difficult to argue against meritocracy. Who could object to people being rewarded for their ability and hard work regardless of background? What happens, though, when you generalise that pattern over several generations, and add in the fact that cognitive ability is highly hereditary?

The children of John and his wife are unlikely to grow up poor or leave school with no qualifications. Those children will be more likely than not to pair up with similar partners. And every time someone like John leaves home for the opportunities of the big city, taking his genes with him, the chances of someone with the most sought-after cognitive abilities being born in his new home increases fractionally, and decreases correspondingly in his place of birth.

We should expect the entry of women into education and the workforce to accentuate this effect. Two clever, well-paid professionals, benefiting from meritocracy to have successful careers before pairing up to start a family, will have a combined income far beyond what could be achieved by a family with one breadwinner and a stay at home parent, or indeed any but the most high-earning of single parents. They will pass these opportunities – along with their genes – to their children, and thus perpetuate the pattern.

Suggested reading

How to make Britain One Nation again

By David Skelton

Over time, the country’s Johns and their equally ambitious wives will increasingly filter out of the general population and pass the fruits of their meritocratic success and genetic ability on to their children. These generations will be doubly advantaged, by their inherited ability and also by their parents’ relative wealth. They will also be more and more geographically concentrated in places where their aptitudes command the highest rewards.

These are tendencies, of course, to which there will be many exceptions, but in aggregate they will make a difference.

In 2017, the Social Mobility Commission reported on a growing concentration of opportunity in some areas and away from other geographic “cold spots”; in 2018 the OECD reported that inequality was becoming more acute and social classes more rigid. It is not news to point to the emergence of an elite, increasingly concentrated in areas economically, geographically and culturally distinct from the “left behind” places abandoned in the pursuit of social mobility.

But the Left has little to say about the role of intelligence in this.

For one thing, it is a little awkward. The chance for anyone to get a great job regardless of origin, and the right of women to enter and succeed in the workplace, have been cherished liberal ideals for decades. It is perhaps easier to ignore or traduce discussions of intelligence and genetics than to consider whether the long-term interaction of hereditary intelligence with meritocracy and second-wave feminism is contributing to other forms of inequality.

Suggested reading

The exploited underclass is revolting

By James Bloodworth

In an alternative world, where we accepted the influence of heritability on cognitive ability but still cared about the poor or vulnerable, what would Left-wing policy look like? Education might be less obsessed with trying to give everyone the same education, or get everyone to university, and more focused on bringing out the best in everyone regardless of natural ability. It might also pay more attention to forms of intelligence overlooked by conventional qualifications and corporate recruitment practices.

Social policy might be less fixated on “social mobility” (in other words easy movement of the clever and motivated toward the elite), and more interested in cohesion across socioeconomic strata. One way this could be applied in practice might be requiring housing developers to pay more than lip service to building a walkable, multigenerational blend of more or less affordable homes.

Such a world might also expect the cognitive elite to be less self-congratulatory about the meritocratic righteousness of their position on top of the pile. Differences of dignity or worth do not follow from differences of intelligence, a fact that seems to have escaped those members of the cognitive elite busy lecturing us de haut en bas about everything from sugar to climate change.

A Left-wing worldview that took into account cognitive ability might even ask an emerging elite to exchange self-righteous entitlement for a sense of duty to the wider community. Something, indeed, not unlike what was once called “noblesse oblige“.

It’s far trickier, however, to touch the topic when you’ve made a few quid. When you’re no longer scraping to get by, questions are asked as to how authentically you can represent working-class experiences. In fact, aren’t you going to have to turn that righteous fist on yourself?

Having spent my life railing against middle-class people and the wealthy, certain that their affluence was in some way linked to my hardship, I now find myself at an uncomfortable crossroads. In the past year, I’ve been given a taste of how the other half live, as the material circumstances of my life changed dramatically. While I still feel like the same person, I feel that my claim to being working-class grows more tenuous by the day.

Further reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

The pivotal moment came when my first book, Poverty Safari, won the Orwell Prize last year. The first thing I asked was: “Can anybody take this away from me?” That question revealed a lot – mainly how I felt the opposite of entitled to win or to even be considered.

That year still feels like a dream. I am now often introduced not only as an Orwell Prize-winner, but also as the writer of a book that George Orwell himself would have commended. This strange association with one of history’s most celebrated authors is flattering but, as I feel it, undeserved. And yet it has quite simply altered the course of my life forever.

The accolade parted the choppy sea of circumstance that for so long had obstructed my progress. Those invisible barriers that impeded my social mobility disappeared and the glimpse of a previously alien life, one without constant financial anxiety, came suddenly and surprisingly into view.

Some people seem bred for success. When people of a higher social caste become successful it is unremarkable and rarely something they must justify. When you grow up in poverty and become successful, you are never allowed to forget it. “Where did you learn to speak so well, Darren?”, is the innocent but rather offensive question I am routinely asked by people who haven’t won an Orwell prize. There’s a reason why some find my ability to articulate coherent sentences so surprising. Few would ask privately-schooled Glaswegian historian Niall Ferguson where he learned “all the big words” he uses.

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

That’s not the worst of it. The real boot in the balls comes when, having been deemed successful by society, you are repeatedly held up not simply as an example of a ‘diamond in the rough’, but as poster-child for the system itself. The system you succeeded in spite of. Having made your name railing aggressively against the status-quo, you are suddenly celebrated as living-proof of its enduring utility.

But one mustn’t complain. One must be grateful to have ascended the slippery snakes-and-ladders board of British society, right? Mustn’t rock the boat too much, for what is given can also be taken away and I (hubris alert) worked hard for my seat at the table. The fear of losing that seat now plays an intrusive role in my thinking, so utterly bowled over by my luck that I dare not protest too much in case the seat is abruptly revoked.

Rather than success, prestige or wealth giving me more freedom to tell society some hard-truths, it has become a rein which, when politely tugged, brings me reluctantly into line. Being granted a seat at the table, rather than unleashing my inner-revolutionary, has had an immediate, moderating effect.

Some of you know what I mean, don’t you? Those of you who can still recall the moment you were offered a seat. You recall the sudden tension between concerns about your community and concerns about yourself; your earnings, your social-standing, your legacy and your next move up the board. When you began to see yourself as your colleagues, contemporaries or an audience might see you, and your incorruptible principles developed a sudden and convenient elasticity which, rather than a lack of moral fibre, became evidence of your fair-minded maturity.

Further reading

Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

The previously strident views you once held and regularly espoused got easier to laugh off as naïve and idealistic. The jobs you called other people hacks for doing gradually gained your respect. Those expense accounts you once criticised as excessive were suddenly justifiable and fair. You changed. You adjusted not only to a certain quality of life, but also became intuitive to what it simply would not do to say, should you wish your run of luck to continue.

It’s amazing how quickly you attune to the prevailing sensibility in this lucrative domain of legitimacy. How grateful you are for the exacting dimensions of the professional sandbox you have been permitted to play in.

I’m now the guy who talks about poverty. My seat at the table is contingent on my willingness to regurgitate ‘personal experiences’ of class, addiction and trauma because that is the reheated vomit that guarantees my social mobility.

I still harbour radical beliefs. I’m still angry. But every seat at the table comes with its own unique restraint. Mine is no different.

Further reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

I can still recall vividly the struggles I faced prior to moving up in the world, but that visceral sense of poverty’s all-consuming immediacy is impossible to retain. I am already beginning to forget what it felt like to struggle on a daily basis.

The impact of political decisions on me is now negligible. That’s why many in my tax-bracket can afford to lecture others about being ‘civil’ and ‘polite’. Affluence pampers you to the extent that you can no longer relate to those whose lives are routinely thrown into chaos because of ill-considered (or downright malign) political decisions.

Twelve months of living comfortably has partially numbed me to the reality millions face in the UK, so what hope is there for those with real power and influence, who rarely contend with reality at all, to bring about meaningful change? In the absence of enough seats at the table for everyone, I fear they will have to be rudely upturned at some point. After all, nothing captures the attention of the ruling class like poor table-manners.

From the moment I booked my first ever First-Class train ticket – the morning after the Orwell ceremony – I was different. The rules of the game changed the second I had something to lose. The moment I realised there is something worth conserving.

Perhaps some of you other ‘diamonds in the rough’, ascending the ladder, will identify with this description of bitter class-conflict? Not the class-conflict curdling public discourse in Britain, but the one quietly raging within your own heart. This is not to say that I don’t still have an appetite for radical change or am unprepared to make sacrifices in pursuit of social justice. But if revolutionary mischief is imminent, it is now highly unlikely that I’ll be firing the starting-gun.

So, why do the details of a person’s college education loom so large in how we perceive ourselves and others? Why should these three or four years influence the next 30 or 40? Why have we gone to so much trouble to expand the university system and burden the young with debt when they should be saving? Why have we turned jobs that were once open to teenage school leavers into graduate-only professions? Why does a country like the UK score so highly on the quality of its universities and yet do so badly on skills and training?

Further reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

One could argue that in a knowledge economy, the university system is how employers identify knowledge workers. However, A levels can do that – and across a wider range of subjects. Some people might add that university is about character as well as qualifications – but in my experience, most graduates leave university not only with a piece of paper, but also with a lot of growing up still to do (I certainly did).

Oh, and please don’t tell me this is all to do with instilling a love of learning. In this anti-intellectual, sub-literate age that just won’t wash.

No, I’m afraid the university boom is more to do with the re-establishment of hierarchy. In the 20th century we smashed up the old symbols of status; being innately hierarchical creatures, we’ve found sly ways of creating new ones. The university system provides an ideal medium.

First of all, it is ostensibly meritocratic – while you are sent to school by your parents, you go to university as your own person. Furthermore, which university you are admitted to is supposedly determined by ability rather than by what your family can afford to pay for (more about that later). So unlike any signifiers of status conferred during childhood, any status based on one’s higher education passes the smell test.

The university system is now big enough to include a large and diverse proportion of the population. But at the same time the range of institutions contained within the system is wide enough to produce gradations of status. Best of all, that status once acquired cannot be lost or superseded by one’s less-favoured rivals. The university you went to is a permanent mark upon your CV, it cannot altered by how big or how little an effort you make later in life. Those who get into the ‘right’ university aged 18, will carry that advantage with them throughout their careers (at least among people and organisations that care about such things).

What should be supremely meritocratic often isn’t – especially when the wealthy and well-connected parents go to absurd lengths to get their children into elite institutions. The recent college bribery scandal in the US was a prime example.

However, as Kevin Carey points out in the New York Times, in many cases, ma and pa needn’t have bothered:

“In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students’ SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are ‘generally indistinguishable from zero.’ Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they don’t get into the Ivy League.”

That said, the same study found that “students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges”.

Further reading

How small bureaucratic hurdles can be big barriers for the poor

By Peter Franklin

A separate study found that “while many kinds of colleges can help students move to the top 20% of the income distribution from the bottom 20%, moving to the top 1% from the bottom 20% almost always requires a highly selective institution.”

But is this explained by the quality of the education that these students receive or by the status of an exclusive label and the social networks they can plug into? If it’s more the latter, then we’ve invented a very expensive way of helping a few students, while painting a meritocratic gloss on a system that still serves the interests of the privileged.

Is there not a more productive (and less Faustian) way of helping a greater number of people? Carey cites another study which found that “students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering at less selective public universities earned more than similar students who chose other majors at more selective universities.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the higher education system is now driving a major misallocation of both public and private resources.

In the UK, a recent study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “[student] loan write-offs now account for 90% of government spending on HE”. Furthermore, this subsidy is being driven “mechanically” to those subjects and institutions that make the least contribution to students’ future job prospects.

Further reading

How to stop the mis-selling of education

By Peter Franklin

The tuition fee and loan system was supposed to increase the independence of the HE sector and expand opportunity for students – and all in the name of meritocracy, of course. The reality is that a system in which “government can expect to write off around half of loans issued” is still deeply dependent on the state. What has changed, however, is that “the government is much less able to target the money it spends on HE”.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we need politicians willing to admit that the funding of the higher education sector is a mess – not least because our attitude to the status conferred by higher education is messed-up.

If we’re more interested in the reality than the mere appearance of meritocracy, then we need a root-and-branch rethink of the entire system.

Marx saw class as an economic category: your class was determined by your place in the system of production. But Marx also believed that there is more to class than your economic role. He distinguished the class ‘in itself’ from the class ‘for itself’, and this ‘for itself’ makes its own special addition to the ‘class struggle’. The proletarian who builds identity, culture, politics and relationships around a working-class status becomes an additional, and decisive, danger to the ruling bourgeoisie.

Just such a class-conscious proletarian was my father, who, having been brought up in great hardship in the Manchester slums, never lost his deep attachment to the community into which he had been born. But it was not a community that could include him. He hated his drunken father, who forced him to leave Manchester High School at the minimum age (then 14) lest he get above himself; he lost his one beloved sibling (Jenny, who died from TB aged 16), and he did nothing to sign up to the kind of job that his family expected. He had only one ambition, which was to get out.

He achieved this, aged 16, by joining the RAF, moving south in the war with Bomber Command, and eventually becoming a primary school teacher, having been hastily educated in the post-war teacher shortage. His life illustrated a feature that has characterised English society since the Middle Ages, which is radical social mobility. No sooner had he reached for a life of his own than he had left the working class. Within a few years he was respectably married, with a semi-detached house and a mortgage, and three children at local grammar schools. He had joined the middle class, even if only the lower echelons, a long way from the demonised bourgeoisie of the Marxist narrative.

More from this author

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

But that’s not how he saw himself. He retained the class-consciousness into which he had been born. As far as he was concerned, he was working class through and through. He spoke with a Manchester accent, supported Manchester United, was a paid-up member of the Labour Party, and also secretary of his local branch of the National Union of Teachers. In all political conflicts, he was on the side of the Trades Union Congress, whatever it decided.

He believed that his country was ruled by a conspiracy of public school boys, and that there would not be social justice in Britain until the privileges that enabled such undeserving and treacherous characters to advance were finally abolished. He saw in the House of Lords, in the established Church and in the Monarchy, branches of this long-standing conspiracy and he understood all of our history in terms of it – as a never-ending confiscation of England from its rightful owners by a class of privileged usurpers. Normans against Saxons, Anglicans against Puritans, Cavaliers against Roundheads, Factory owners against the industrial working class – all such conflicts, for my father, illustrated the one great truth about England, which is that it has been, is and will always be a society riven by the great division between upper and lower class.

Interestingly, he did not subscribe to the Marxist worldview. Indeed, he was, in his special way, a patriot, who believed (rightly as it happened) that Marxism was nothing but a conspiracy to betray our country to Stalin. For him class was a moral rather than an economic category. It was the ‘class for itself’ that contained the true story of people like himself, who carried the flickering light of the oppressed proletariat in the catacombs to which the upper class had banished them.

More from this author

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

And the members of the upper class – although, of course, they owned everything and stole everything – were not, primarily, defined by their economic status. Far more important were accent, dress, manners and sociolect. They said ‘lunch’ when we said ‘dinner’, and ‘dinner’ when we said ‘tea’. They had salaries while we earned wages; they went out to dinner in restaurants, while we stood rounds of drinks in the pub (but only on Friday, after the wage packet). They watched rugby and cricket rather than football, and – most important of all – they voted Conservative, while we voted Labour.

The great divide between them and us showed itself in everything that mattered: taste in art, literature and music, ways of getting about (car versus bus), religion (Church versus Chapel), recreation (hunting and shooting versus picnics and zoos) and of course education (Oxford and Cambridge versus whatever else you could scrape).

This conception of class, as a moral rather than an economic category, has survived the very many changes that have wiped away the England of those days. We still live in a society in which class resentment is a major social and political force, and in which people strive to make sense of all that happens to them in terms of the great ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Tell educated Americans that the question of whether or not to ban hunting with hounds occupied 240 hours of Parliamentary time, while the decision to go to war in Iraq took only 18 hours, and they will be entirely non-plussed – especially when you add that virtually nothing else was discussed by the ruling Labour Party during the two or three years that it devoted to this topic. But when you explain that the aim was not to protect foxes but to punish the upper class, a light will dawn. For they will know, as we all know, that class in this country is not only a matter of moral status, but a matter of highly developed and inexhaustible social drama.

This theatrical side retains its appeal, and its comic possibilities – exploited so brilliantly by Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh – have made an unforgettable contribution to our knowledge of, and I would also say compassion for, the human condition. But it was not the theatrical side of the class war that obsessed my father. For him it was a matter, not of life or death exactly, but of faith versus betrayal.

I longed to breathe some other air than the ‘for itself’ that made such a fug in our living room (not drawing room, note, since that was what they said). I gathered around myself arty friends and exotic drop-outs. My father began to react with intense and vigilant hostility. He had been deeply opposed to grammar school, though I had no choice but to attend it. He strongly suspected (and rightly) that our school wanted to make us all into Etonians. He hoped against hope that I would not get into Cambridge, and was never reconciled to the fact that I did so – though to be honest it was unavoidable at the time. All in all I passed through adolescence bearing the stigmata of a class traitor, even though all I was doing was what my father had done, in escaping from the tyranny of Capel Street, Ancoats, into the meadows of Old England.

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The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

Having embarked on this path it is very hard to turn back. Our grammar schools – mine for boys and the one for girls that my sisters attended – imparted a kind of bland, proper, middle England accent which identified us with no specific class. We found ourselves advancing in whatever sphere was open to us, not because we were particularly adept or ambitious but because that is the nature of life: lean against a door and it opens, unless someone is pushing from the other side.

At Cambridge I advanced as far as an ordinary lower-class heterosexual can manage – which in those days was not very far. But, as the years have gone by, I have made up for the social disabilities of those days (though not the one mentioned), and managed to make an independent life in which class plays no significant role. Social mobility, for me, was the escape route from resentment and the way of looking on the world with acceptance and love. And that is how it should be.

But this very social mobility, which ought to undermine the distinctions between classes, as it does in America, is here in Britain dismissed as a fiction. The great us/them divide remains untouched by it, as it was untouched for my father.

Something about class resentment appeals to us – we cling to it, sustain it with fictions and dramas, and allow it to colour our social contacts and our political beliefs. Why is this? Perhaps, in the end, there is a kind of consolation contained in it. Perhaps, by self-identifying as working class, we join the heroic story of the English people, whose rightful inheritance was once stolen, we don’t quite know how, by people from elsewhere. Maybe some vestige of this narrative can be perceived in the drama of our country now.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

George Orwell was wrong.

About class, that is.

His most important book on the subject is The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937. The first half is an eye-witness account of working class life in the industrial North and Midlands. Unflinching in his descriptions, he left his readership in no doubt about the misery he saw.

And yet it was the second half of the book that proved the more controversial – not because he saw socialism as the answer, but because of who he identified as one of the great obstacles to the achievement of socialism: his fellow socialists.

The doctrinaire, priggish, pretentious cranks of the Left-wing intelligentsia were turning potential allies into opponents, Orwell said. He argued that the “humbug” of “bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois themselves” was making enemies out of people who were economically working class, but culturally middle class:

“The very last person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or a commercial traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the ‘proletarian’ cant with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order to symbolize the class war, there has been set up the more or less mythical figure of a ‘proletarian’, a muscular but downtrodden man in greasy overalls, in contradistinction to a ‘capitalist’, a fat, wicked man in a top hat and fur coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no one in between; the truth being, of course, that in a country like England about a quarter of the population is in between.”

By cutting the proletarian cant and including this quarter of the population among the oppressed, the fight against the oppressor and for socialism could be won, he believed.

And that’s where he was wrong. He portrayed this group as the “sinking middle class” – composed of people like the “the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns”. Counting himself among their number, he invited them to let go and “sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong… we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”

Suggested reading

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

The alternative to Orwell’s inclusive socialism was a dreadful one:

“It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”

The middle class, however, had other ideas. It would sink neither into socialism nor fascism, thank you very much. Instead, it would rise ever higher on a flood tide of prosperity. Furthermore, and as if to prove Orwell completely wrong, great swathes of the working class would breakaway to join them.

This is the history of millions of British families – including my own.

*

George Orwell was born in 1903; my paternal grandfather was born two years later. The former was born in India – the son of a British civil servant; the latter in the East End of London – the son of a cabinet maker.

The Orwell family was therefore middle class; my family working class. But we can refine those categories. Orwell’s grandfather was a clergyman and his great-grandfather was landed gentry. So, not just middle class, but upper-middle class. At the same time, we can see a story of wealth diminishing down the generations, which is why Orwell described himself as “lower-upper-middle class” – “the correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money.”

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Ideologues miss Orwell's greatest lesson

By James Bloodworth

I’m afraid the Franklins cannot trace their ancestors as far back as the Orwells. People born in the poorest part of Victorian London didn’t have family trees. Presumably at some point in the 19th century, or perhaps before that, an ancestor left the countryside to find work in the Great Wen. But there’s no memory of it, and so the story begins with my great-grandfather. Being a skilled craftsman, he wasn’t just working class, but upper-working class – not that he’d have described himself that way.

His son, my grandfather, left school at 14 to follow his father’s trade. That would have meant a long apprenticeship in the same workshop, ensuring the skills necessary to making furniture were deeply ingrained by doing the same tasks over-and-over again. As an apprentice he would have been paid a pittance, but by the end of it he could cut a dovetail joint with his eyes closed. Thus as a young man he’d have earned a half-decent wage, enough to save a few shillings each week. By the 1930s, he’d saved enough not only to get married, but to realise two previously inconceivable ambitions – to own his own home and to get out of the East End.

An opportunity presented itself: about half-an-hour’s train ride away, in Essex, farm land was being auctioned off in small plots to the highest bidder. My grandfather bought four of them at £5 each. And then he built a house – in his spare time (he was still working his day job in the East End). It took him two years of early mornings, late nights and weekends, but he did it – he had a home, fresh air and a family.

Suggested reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

But before this turns into the Essex version of The Darling Buds of May, I should point out the less-than-idyllic realities. Firstly, the strain of building a house while holding down a job took a toll on my grandfather’s health. Sawing through sheets of asbestos roofing material wouldn’t have helped either.

As for the rural setting, the plotlands were never fully serviced – and later plans to change this were interrupted by the war. My dad and his sisters therefore grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water (there were standpipes further down the unsurfaced road). That said, they were luckier than a lot of their neighbours. Before the war, most of the plots were used as weekend getaways – and contained caravans and shacks as opposed to anything that could be called a house. But once the Blitz started, these filled up with families living there full-time in all seasons.

These days we’d call it a shanty town, but to those who made their new lives there it meant safety, freedom and a stake in the future.

Nothing much remains of the plotlands: what hasn’t been swallowed up by suburbia is now a park.  A single house – ‘The Haven’ – is preserved as a testament to a vanished way of life. 

In the post-war period, the rest were cleared away, with people moving out to new towns like nearby Laindon and Basildon. That’s where my father went to school – and where he went to work, aged 16, in a council drawing office. His employers trained him up as a land surveyor – both on the job and at evening classes in a local college. This led to other jobs, with increasing managerial responsibility, until he and my mother started their own business and bought their own home. By the time my brother and I came along, it was simply assumed that we’d do A-levels and go to university, which duly we did.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Things that were simply unimaginable to my great-grandfather became run-of-the-mill to my generation.

*

I don’t tell this story because it’s exceptional, but because, details aside, it’s the story of middle England.

At the beginning of the 20th century only 10% of homes were owner occupied; by the Millennium, it was 70%. As recently as the 1960s, fewer than 5% of school leavers went to university; the figure now stands at nearly 50%. As for what proportion of people call themselves middle class, that depends on the survey and how it phrases the question. But if one looks at occupation, the non-manual professions accounted for only a third of households in the late 1960s, but more than half after 2000.

Despite two World Wars and the Cold War, the 20th century was a time of expanding opportunities for ordinary working Britons. Writing from the perspective of the 1930s, the industrial North and his own straitened circumstances, Orwell can be forgiven for missing the trend, but he was unquestionably wrong: the middle class wasn’t sinking, it was recruiting.

In the post-war period, the cultural elites couldn’t deny what was happening – so they tragedised and satirised it instead. In America, there was Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play about the shattering of middle class delusions. In his autobiography, Miller wrote that his purpose had been to condemn a “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”

In Britain, there was John Brain’s 1957 novel Room at the Top, in which the working class protagonist plots his social ascent by impregnating the daughter of a well-to-do family and casting aside his true love. By the 1970s, the collision of the classes was being played for laughs – Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh being a classic of the genre.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Well, fair enough – social pretension provides a worthy target for the social critic. But for the most part, social mobility is not ridiculous, it is glorious. For the first time in history, it wasn’t just the fortunate few who could dare to dream – and work hard to make those dreams come true – but the great mass of the people. So, never mind the drama and the comedy, where’s the celebration?

*

What we gained in the 20th century, we risk losing in the 21st – perhaps because we’ve placed so little value upon it.

These are not optimistic times. The young no longer expect to be richer than their parents. In part, that’s due to economic stagnation. Growth rates are slower now than they were in the post-war decades and wealth is more unequally distributed. Room at the top is not being created the way it used to be.

But we’re also making it harder for people to make their way up. The grips and footholds that allowed my family to better their lot have been chipped away. The land my grandfather built his house on cost £20 – about 10% of his annual earnings. What would it cost to get a building plot in the commuter belt in 2019? A multiple, not a fraction, of a half-decent salary – and that’s assuming you could get planning permission.

Then there’s the training my father got to become a land surveyor – which didn’t cost him anything. In fact he was being paid and, in the latter stages, given time off for formal instruction. Today, you have to go to university to become a land surveyor – or to undertake a whole range of once non-graduate professions. At least when I went to university there were no tuition fees, unlike the present era when you can expect to be charged the best part of £30,000 – whether you go to Oxbridge or an ex-poly.

*

My grandfather left school a hundred years ago. Over that time, the nature of work has changed beyond recognition for millions of people. In the space of just three generations, my family went from building things, to making accurate drawings of them, to writing about them for websites. As a society, we have dematerialised production, disembodied knowledge and placed value in the abstract.

And yet economic inclusion still depends on the same fundamentals – learning how to do something useful and finding a place to call your own. These are the twin paths to prosperity, but after a century of progress, we’ve placed tollbooths across both of them.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Not so long ago I was chatting to an urbane young businessman at a London party: after a few minutes he raised his eyebrows and asked: “And… you went to school?” It took a second before I realised he wasn’t questioning whether I had had any formal education, but using the old code Etonians employ when referring to their College.

It is a masonic handshake, but so very much more exclusive. It is a nod to understood values along with a wry acknowledgement of the self-regarding uniqueness of the place. These codes, the jokes and their understanding are a small but not insignificant part of the package for which my parents, and my grandparents, and several generations before them, paid all that money.

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

For a long time I told myself that a few years at Eton hadn’t meant very much to my life. After all, it was not a long stint – as I made clear to that smooth OE (old Etonian) and do to anyone else who brings it up – I was ejected after less than three years, at 16 (for smoking, drinking and suspected homosexual tendencies beyond the norm).

I was quite proud then that Eton’s quality control system had found me wanting; I was pretty sure I didn’t want any more of what the school offered and I was not unaware of the hallowed line of Eton rejects and rebels for whom life turned out interestingly. In the time of The Jam’s ‘Eton Rifles’ being expelled from Eton was pretty cool.

But I realise now that I am indelibly marked by the place, as I am by the values and rules of the class that used it. It’s like a tattoo you got on a drunken night long ago and which peeks out from your sleeve to embarrass. It’s not that it helped fast-track me to university, or into a top job. I spent my 20s and 30s working in Left-wing theatre and then centre-Leftish journalism, and while hardly meritocratic, being an old or ex-Etonian wasn’t an obvious advantage in those fields. Not as much as was being white, male and privileged.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Privilege is a difficult concept – a word thrown around to the extent of losing much usefulness. But it is of enormous importance when you weigh up class and Britain today. It means more than entitlement: it is the ownership of a range of tools that, as any self-help book will tell you, are useful for a traditionally successful life. Self-confidence, self-belief, persuasiveness, and what used to be called ‘clubbability’.

I know an old Etonian who makes part of his living touring private schools giving lectures to the pupils on “charm” and how it gets you everything – headmasters’ wives love him.

Privilege gets many unquantifiable things that can turn out to be of enormous value: an understanding of how clubs and networks function, connections, a stamp of acceptability based on unspoken shared beliefs.

It is a freemasonry, and membership translates into jobs, wealth and power: it’s no wonder that the proportions of judges and senior lawyers, of armed forces top brass, of politicians and senior business leaders who were privately educated today is pretty much what it was 50 years ago. It works – a place at Eton for your son is not a bad bet, if you can afford it. The prizes are huge, and the odds on getting them still pretty favourable.

Politicians, both Left and Right, have attempted to address the gross inequality the system clearly perpetuates ever since Churchill encouraged Rab Butler to democratise the public schools during the war (see David Kynaston and Francis Green’s recent Engines of Privilege: the British Private School Problem for a fascinating history of this political failure).

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Yet while the products of public schools have always been among the institutions’ worst enemies, the institutions themselves have proved remarkably resilient. It is born of an inherent flexibility, the quality that has kept my class in power in Britain for so many centuries. You can come in, if you’ve got the money, or the brains, or the looks. It worked and still does: if it did not, the British would surely have risen and torn down those spires long ago.

There are two things around today that might challenge this long-fossilised situation. The first is financial. Eton – and everywhere like it – is very, very expensive today. It always was: 70 years ago the annual fee was “about the same as a Rolls-Royce, or keeping a mistress in Maida Vale,” as an old joke has it. But when my parents sent me there in 1974 the basic charge was £861, the equivalent of £9000 today. In 2019, a year at the school costs nearer £42,000, before extras.

Even at a private day school, the average is £15,000. Across the boarding sector fees are up 50% in 10 years. Sums like these can only hurt the traditional public-school customer base, the squirearchy and the professions. Can Etons populated solely by the children of the super-rich and a few scholarship-holders survive the political clamour to remove the tax-breaks and the schools’ (indefensible) status as charities?

My other thought is more speculative. I wonder if the Eton brand is now gravely tarnished. Many charges are commonly laid against Etonians and their class – arrogance, greed, callousness, and that’s just to start – but I think their fatal flaw might be an inherent lack of seriousness. “We are often told that they taught us nothing at Eton. That may be so, but I think they taught it very well.” said General Herbert Plumer – one of the “donkey” leaders of the first world war – when addressing an Old Etonians’ dinner in 1916.

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By Matthew Goodwin

I think of Plumer when I read Boris Johnson at his bombastic heights. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really mean it. Etonian humour is a lovely thing – there’s a strong tendency to self-deprecation that seems very healthy – but it may also cover up many failings. Particularly when coupled with the abiding sense that the destiny, by right, of a young man leaving the school is to go out and make the world a better place.

The system seems – dangerously – to produce people who look like leaders, talk like leaders, but don’t lead very well at all. It is an old charge, but the list of failed Etonians is long today. At its top is David Cameron, the amiable schoolboy who liked a game of poker, and went on to take unforgivable gambles with Britain’s future, the price of which we are all now paying.

Your reaction to all this may well depend on where you went to school, or indeed if you went to “school”. But let me leave you this, from Alec Waugh. His account of Sherborne, The Loom of Youth, was published in 1919, to outrage at what now seem the tamest scenes of homosexual yearning. But it is the teenage Waugh’s savage assault on the public-school class and its hypocrisies that is more interesting. And yet, like most ex-public school boys, Waugh is, ultimately, ironic and ambivalent:

“He is selfish, easy-going, pleasure-loving, absolutely without a conscience. But he is a jolly good companion and the Freemasonry of a Public School is amazing. No man who has been through a good Public School is an outsider. He may hang around the Empire bar, he may cheat at business; but you may be certain of one thing, he will never let you down. Very few Public School men ever do a mean thing to their friends. And for a system which produces such a spirit as this there is much to be said after all.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

Passing a group of Westminster sixth-formers on the street recently sent me on a journey into memory that reminded me of an unspoken truth of political debate around education and opportunity. Though politicians all say they want more social mobility, they don’t really mean it. Or at least, they wouldn’t mean it if they stopped to think about what that actually means.

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The boys in question could have come from central casting. All tall, all thin, all floppy hair and loud good humour. One wore the sort of overcoat politicians wear to the Cenotaph, another a Tweed shooting jacket. Both fit perfectly. As did the uniforms that look more like lounge suits. The loafers and brogues were scuffed, of course, but not so much as to conceal how expensive they were.

From 50 yards off, I’d initially clocked them for a group of Tory researchers, either from Conservative party HQ or the Commons, heading back to the office after lunch. It was only when they drew closer that I even realised not one of them was old enough to vote.

The Proustian thing was that seeing those boys – young men, more accurately – strolling through Dean’s Yard took me back to a trip I made to Oxford University 25-odd years ago for an interview.

There were a lot of reasons that I didn’t, in the end, take up a place at Oxford, but one was that it just didn’t feel like a place for someone like me. Too many of the other candidates were cut from the same cloth as those Westminster boys: charming, confident, self-assured and comfortable. They knew they belonged there.

(Some things don’t change. A headteacher in the Northumberland town where I was born recently told me about a boy from his school who is a truly gifted mathematician, the sort of brain that wins prizes and makes millions. So keen was the head to ensure that his pupil ended up at a college with a quad that he personally accompanied the boy to open days and interviews – his parents were too poor and too scared. And when it all paid off and Oxbridge opened its door to that boy? He said No. It just wasn’t a place for him.)

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What’s this got to do with social mobility policy? Think again about what social mobility means. It’s a measure of how much someone’s final economic status moves independently of their background: real social mobility means where you end up is determined by your talent, character, effort and actions, not the family you happened to grow up in.

Naturally, politicians talk about upward mobility, focusing on how easily (or not) children from poorer homes can “climb the ladder”, get more education and income than their parents and generally, to use an out-of-fashion phrase, better themselves. Who doesn’t like a story of upward mobility, of people working their way to the top? Of course we want more of that, so of course that’s what politicians like to sell us.

But political conversation on social mobility rarely dwells on downward mobility, where someone ends up with less money and status than their parents. This isn’t a theoretical thing. It happens, though generally only to people who start out in the lower half of the income distribution. If you grow up rich, you’ll almost certainly stay rich in later life; your chances of experiencing downward social mobility are really quite small.

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Why? A lot of people — especially ones who went to private schools and write for Right-wing newspapers – like to explain everything through education: richer kids go to better schools and get better grades, so of course they get better jobs, it’s said. That’s the way of the world, folks. If you want to change it, provide better schools for poor kids.

And of course, poor kids need and deserve better schools; Matthew Goodwin set out that case brilliantly on UnHerd last week. But guess what? Better schools for poor kids will not be enough.

Ask just about any politician about social mobility and they’ll immediately talk about the need to improve state education. They probably won’t talk about the work of Abigail McKnight of the London School of Economics.

In 2015, she produced a report for the Government showing that differences in education aren’t the only reason the British jobs market is tilted in favour of the privileged.

Analysing data from the British Cohort Study — which tracks the lives of 17,000 people born in the same week in 1970 – McKnight reached the following conclusion:

“Children from more advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to have high earnings in later adult life and are more likely to be in a ‘top job’. This is not simply due to different levels of cognitive ability as it holds within attainment groups as well as over the complete distribution.”

In other words, a clever rich kid will grow up to earn more than an equally clever poor one.

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Indeed, this effect is so strong that some not-so-clever rich kids will grow up to out-earn much smarter poor kids. Their relative failure in education won’t cause them to slide down the ladder.

McKnight sees a “glass floor” under their outcomes, a level below which they cannot fall. She might as well have called it a ‘class floor’ because class plays a huge part in explaining why some people really can’t fail in life, no matter how little they try.

This is what Richard Reeves, a former adviser to Nick Clegg, has called “dream hoarding”. Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game: one person’s success means another cannot succeed. A job taken by an averagely-bright middle class applicant can’t be won by a bright poor one. McKnight speaks of “lower-skilled advantaged children blocking the success of higher-skilled disadvantaged children through the hoarding of opportunities.”

How does this happen? Another 2015 study by the Social Mobility Commission conducted numerous interviews with recruiters from “top” firms in law, accountancy and banking, exploring why their recruitment is skewed in favour of applicants from better-off backgrounds.

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While richer people do tend to get higher exam grades and degrees from “better” universities, that wasn’t the only reason they got the best jobs. The study found that “elite firms define ‘talent’ according to a number of factors such as drive, resilience, strong communication skills and above all confidence and ‘polish’, which participants in the research acknowledged can be mapped on to middle-class status and socialisation.”

In other words, people handing out top jobs aren’t recruiting purely on the basis of brainpower and talent. They’re also hiring the soft skills, demeanour and habits that a privileged upbringing gives you – regardless of your talents or industry.

So those Westminster lads strolling through the yard are right to exhibit such comfort and confidence. They are the holders of what amounts to an insurance policy against failure in life. Even if they do relatively poorly in their exams or at university, they will still, in statistical probability, do OK in life. Indeed, it’s quite possible that their “polish” will see them through to a high-earning career regardless – possibly even beating smarter, poorer kids seeking the same jobs.

A bad outcome for them would be to end up about as wealthy and successful as their parents; falling down the ladder to end up poorer would most likely require either conscious choice or significant, and thus unlikely, misfortune or malfeasance. Botching some exams or even – whisper it – just being a bit thick wouldn’t be enough to put them on the breadline.

Anyone who went to one of our “better” universities will grasp this on an anecdotal level, familiar with stories of contemporaries from affluent homes who drank, toked and dozed their way to a 2:2, or even a third, yet still somehow ended up with a job in the City and a nice house in Fulham. Medicine, the law and politics are generously staffed with people who succeeded at least in part because their parents insulated them from the risk of failure.

But this goes beyond anecdote. McKnight’s data shows that children from high income backgrounds who show signs of low academic ability at age 5 are 35% more likely to be high earners as adults than children from poorer families who show early signs of high ability. Tim Nice But Dim has long vanished from TV, but he lives on in that data and the UK economy.

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That study on “polish” and the McKnight paper were both published in 2015. Just as the Coalition government was winding down, the Social Mobility Commission, under Alan Milburn and Gillian Shephard, was just starting to dig into the neglected, uncomfortable but vital aspects of the social mobility challenge.

Four years is a long time in British politics, and the last four especially so. Precious few politicians wanted to engage with that research at the time, and those that did sadly aren’t in a position to build on it. Justine Greening was keen to tackle this issue when she was Education Secretary, but is now wasted on the backbenches. Milburn and Shephard ended up quitting in frustration at Theresa May’s timidity and lack of commitment to social mobility.

Their replacements are serious, well-meaning people; Damian Hinds, the current education secretary, knows the social mobility debate as well as just about any politician. But – in part, no doubt, because of the vast distraction of Brexit – neither he nor the Prime Minister has yet shown the boldness to acknowledge that true social mobility is a sword that cuts both ways; let alone to swing that blade at the armour with which middle-class parents equip their kids.

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To be fair, there are some positive signs. Sam Friedman, an LSE sociologist and the co-author of an excellent recent book (The Class Ceiling – Why it Pays to be Privileged) is now a member of the new Social Mobility Commission. But he’s one of many commissioners, and the worry is that this SMC lacks the focus and clout Alan Milburn’s body had.

The US debate about downward mobility has been illuminated by the work of Reeves, now at the Brookings Institute in Washington; as a country with a clearer story about the importance of mobility, America is perhaps more receptive to new arguments here. But so far, British politicians haven’t quite caught up with these issues.

I can’t think of a politician who doesn’t say Britain should be more socially mobile, that we should have more social mobility. Would quite so many of them be so quick to use those words if ‘more social mobility’ was understood to mean ‘more mediocre middle-class kids ending up poor’?

Breaking the class floor won’t be quick or easy. CV-blind recruitment and ‘contextual’ data on applicants’ backgrounds would be a start. A bigger goal would be challenging the value that is still attached to that polished debating-points style that has its apotheosis in a certain sort of Oxford PPE graduate.

If politicians are serious about social mobility, they should acknowledge and embrace its implications, even if they are uncomfortable on behalf of people for whom comfort is not an aspiration but the norm.

What Gore Vidal said of friendship is true of social mobility too: “It is not enough to succeed. Others have to fail.”

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

In any usual week, you’ll read news stories that are annoying and some that are disagreeable. Occasionally you’ll come one that is outright reprehensible. At the end of January, one such piece sidled onto the BBC’s website, where it received far less attention than it would have done in any normal season. It was published on the front page of the BBC’s website under the headline: “I’m mixed race, is Cambridge university right for me?”

I had to read the headline a couple of times before it made any sense. My first thought was, “What the hell?” Then: “Why would it not be?” For a nano-second I wondered whether, since my last visit there, Cambridge had perhaps become some kind of infamous racist hellhole?

The piece itself was written by a young woman called Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty. She had been offered a place at the university and was using the article to weigh up the relative merits of the offer. It was, though, the framing, presentation and prominence given to the story by the BBC that I found most appalling.

Introducing the story, the BBC website stated:

“Anoushka Mutanda Dougherty has been offered a place at Cambridge University, but she’s mixed-race and from a state school – and only 3% of students who started at Cambridge in 2017 were black, or mixed-race with black heritage. So is it the best place for her? At this point, she’s not sure.”

It is, first of all, worth noting the casualness of that “but”: “…but she’s mixed race.” As though the latter fact (being mixed race) would negate or significantly throw into question the former (being offered a place at Cambridge). Deployed so provocatively –or carelessly – it undermines years of work by institutions, such as Cambridge University, to improve access to people of all backgrounds. It suggests to young people coming up that a set of such contradictory possibilities must indeed be carefully weighed up.

Only the relatively small proportion of the public who have seen these institutions first-hand will know how misleading this is. There were black and mixed race students at Cambridge, when I used to visit 20 years ago, just as there were at Oxford at the same time. Other than an ongoing push to increase access to people of all backgrounds, there was no problem about any of this.  So what could possibly have changed?

Nothing negative, that is for certain. Over recent decades Oxbridge has spent considerable time and money attempting to ensure that its facilities and world-class tuition are available to the widest possible variety of people. It has significantly reduced the number of people getting into the university from private and public schools, and significantly increased the number of students attending Oxbridge from state schools.

Like every other publicly funded institution in the UK, Oxbridge pursues ‘diversity’ as an objective. More than a decade ago, an admissions tutor at Oxford explained how the top universities have attempted to ensure that students from minorities aren’t underrepresented. As Tom Kemp of St John’s said, there are only three options open to the universities to improve access: to wait for every school in the country to be as good as the top private schools; to have a government-enforced mandate which would mean that universities would have to seriously compromise on quality; or to do what universities like Oxford and Cambridge have been doing for decades now – which is to engage in “positive discrimination in favour of candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

He continued: “I know of no subject tutor in my college, or in my subject university-wide, who would not give the benefit of the doubt to an applicant from an under-privileged background who appeared to have a spark that belied their modest achievements to date.”

There is no evidence that the country’s oldest universities are failing in this ambition. In fact, the percentage of black students at Cambridge University which the BBC piece presents as some outrageous example of under-representation (3%) is almost exactly in line with the number of British citizens who identified as black in the last census.

So does the BBC expect Cambridge to have an over-representation of people of one racial background? If so, then which racial groups would they wish to see under-represented? None of these mitigating facts is included in the piece and none of the follow-on implications is remotely contended with.

In her piece, Mutanda Dougherty did tell us her own back story. She explained that her mother is one of the Ugandan Asians forced by Idi Amin to flee Uganda in the 1970s; she claims that the story of her mother and fellow Ugandan Asians is “largely overlooked” and that there is “little understanding” of the struggles that they faced – and says this is one of the reasons why she would feel nervous attending Cambridge. While this may be true, this it is hard to prove. For while many may be ignorant of the history of Ugandan Asians, many others will not be. Besides which, most people are ignorant of most things, and all of us are ignorant of an awful lot. In the UK, 70% of young people have never heard of Chairman Mao. So perhaps ignorance about what went on in Uganda decades before they were born, while sad, may not be entirely out of the question.

Of course, one way for more people to become aware of what took place would be if a bright young student such as Mutanda Dougherty were to tell people about it – both in her circle of contemporaries and friends, and eventually, perhaps, to some wider audience.  The alternative – seclusion only with people of precisely the same ethnic background and the identical hereditary experience – would be the best way to make sure such history were eventually forgotten.

To their credit, her parents encouraged Mutanda to apply to Cambridge, and it is their daughter who says that she is worried about being among “quite a high proportion of pupils from private schools” in a “majority white and majority posh (!) institution”.

This difference between the generations gets to the heart of why an argument like this, and a piece like it, are so disheartening.  There are any number of ways to write about majority populations and minority access. It can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of imperfect progress, or it can be written about and contemplated in a spirit of ever-renewable grudge.  The opportunity of going to a university such as Cambridge can be written about as something available to anyone who works, and applies themselves, and is then fortunate enough to win a place. Or it can be written about in the weaponised, racialised tone that is contaminating everything at present.

Mutanda Dougherty is not alone in adopting this tone. It has been deployed by a much older and more seasoned practitioner: Polly Toynbee. It is over a decade since Toynbee published her book (with David Walker) Unjust Rewards, in which she accompanied a group of black schoolchildren from Brent to see the colleges of Oxford. Were they there to inspire the students and instil in them the lesson that, with enough hard work and a little bit of luck they might get there too?

No such luck. Toynbee and her co-author took the children to Oxford to flaunt it before them, only to explain that it would never be for them (see Giles Coren’s memorable evisceration of this here. As Toynbee and Walker concluded, “The Brent students will likely find themselves in a rust-stained concrete polytechnic not far from home.”

Such a situation would only be ‘likely’ if students from disadvantaged backgrounds or from any minority group were presented with the idea that the top universities are loaded against them from the start. Toynbee and Walker chose to push that idea 10 years ago. But there can have been few higher profile or more damaging perpetuations of the same demoralising claim than the piece the BBC so prominently published last month. In any other season it would have caused outrage. It should summon a little in this season too.

That is why I simply cannot understand why well-meaning, normally intelligent, people on the Left keep coming back to ‘separate but equal’ as if it were anything but a fraud. The latest proposal is from Lord Adonis, who has proposed tackling the dominance of private-school pupils at Oxbridge by setting up new separate colleges for children from poor backgrounds and state schools. He tells us, in his Guardian article headlined “Oxford and Cambridge must launch new colleges for disadvantaged young people”, that this will be just like previous access efforts for women and “persecuted religious minorities” for whom separate colleges were set up in the past.

Let’s not even try to celebrate how progressive these universities were to set up special colleges for persecuted religious minorities. Until 1854, Oxford kept out anyone who wouldn’t sign the 39 articles of the Protestant faith – and the first Catholic halls were not set up until the 1890s. Those who weren’t members of the Church of England were simply not welcome in our universities for generations, and allowing Catholics to set up a college was a simple way to prevent integration.

The case for women is more complex, because women still have their own colleges at Cambridge, though no longer at Oxford. As it happens, I studied at one – New Hall, now known as Murray Edwards. I know exactly what it’s like to be in a separate but equal institution. These separate institutions are always second class, however noble their founders’ dreams.

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For starters, there isn’t any money. Unlike the old colleges, the new ones don’t have land and investments dating back centuries to fund the costs of today. Book grants, subsidised food, cheap rent: forget about it. I was student union president and there was student demand for a rent strike over our high bills. The bursar showed me the books. There was no point. The place was permanently cash-strapped.

And no money means the academics are overstretched. They are often underpaid, too, and however dedicated they may be to the cause of women’s education, most have their eye on a more comfortable gig, down the hill, in the town centre, in a nice old building with a quiet courtyard and a little slice of history.

A good friend of mine used to invite girls back to the Trinity College library to see the manuscript copy of Winnie the Pooh held there. He tells me it was a great way to seal the deal; every girl loved it. At New Hall we didn’t have any rare books, and our most famous alumna was either Mel or Sue from Bake Off – I can’t remember which.

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Lord Adonis has a predecessor in his fool’s errand. In the 1870s, educational reformer and clergyman Joseph Paul Brereton tried to set up a college in Oxford for poor children from the county school system. When that failed, he set it up in Cambridge, to be known as Cavendish college. It was a mile out of town. The accommodation was bad. The schools didn’t want to send their pupils to this inferior Cambridge college – they wanted to send their pupils to the proper ones. Cavendish college lasted less than 20 years.

So we already know what would happen if we did as Lord Adonis recommends. He’d take the poorest group of students, with the lowest family resources, and put them into the poorest college, least able to afford book grants or hardship funds, forced to charge market rent to pay the cost of the buildings in which people are housed. These students would be far out of town, the only place cheap enough to buy land for these new colleges, so they’d have commuting costs those town-centre elites could only imagine. They’d probably have to work to make ends meet, putting them at an academic disadvantage against those with low bills, low costs, and independent funding.

The new students would have the same potential but they wouldn’t live it out.

But the most insidious effect would be to take the pressure off the old colleges to reform. Establishing women’s colleges allowed women into Cambridge without the old colleges having to open their doors. It was several more decades before the first colleges went co-educational, and decades again until the last men’s-only college reformed.

When I matriculated at New Hall in 1999, the senior tutor told us to believe – above all – that our college wasn’t second-class, and we were not second-class students. The old colleges, she said, just don’t know what clever women look like. And the sad truth is that the existence of New Hall – and Murray Edwards – means they still don’t need to learn.

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There are probably plenty of fusty old dons in Oxford and Cambridge colleges who would like Lord Adonis’ idea. It would keep the plebs out of their old traditions. It would give them a guilt-free excuse to stop worrying about access for poor children, because someone else (out of sight and out of mind) is worrying about that. In fact, they are the ones who must leave.

The funny thing is, when I first saw the headline for Lord Adonis’ article, I thought the idea was for Oxford and Cambridge to set up new sixth-form colleges, which is a brilliant idea. Hot-house kids with great potential and poor family backgrounds, either for their A-levels, or for a gap-year in between, and you have the best chance to level the playing field with those educated in our most expensive private schools.

So let’s do that instead, and leave the idea of separate-but-equal colleges where it belongs: on the scrap heap.

Ultimately, the closed shop was outlawed by the Conservative government in the early 1990s – a move designed not only to tame the unions, but also to bring the UK into line with European legislation. (I wonder how many among today’s fanatically pro-EU labour movement know or even care about this.)

But there is one closed shop that wasn’t outlawed. In fact, it’s the most powerful that ever existed, and it remains alive and well. It members are not those fighting against the system, but those running it.

After years of talk by politicians about the value of meritocracy and the need to smash glass ceilings, progress at tackling the culture of elitism that infects the upper echelons of our public life and institutions has been utterly lamentable. And this failure is resulting in a nation increasingly atomised, and in which large numbers simmer with resentment at those who exercise power over them while seemingly being devoid of any desire to understand their lives.

Politics, business, the media and public services remain resolutely in the grip of those who (let’s be clear, through no fault of their own) were born into wealth and privilege. Class, parental income and geography remain key determinants in how far one might rise. Advancement in today’s Britain is still as much about who you know, not what you know; about where you came from, not what ability you might have.

Introducing Open vs Closed

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

In its most recent State of the Nation report, the Social Mobility Commission found a labour market highly polarised, with five million workers caught in a low-pay trap from which there is little chance of escape. Predictably, London, the Home Counties and East of England dominate when it comes to high-skilled, high-paid and knowledge-based jobs. 58% of internships – often a pathway to a plum job and career – were located in the Capital, placing them out-of-bounds to millions. That many were unpaid rendered them further inaccessible to the less advantaged. And it’s not only workers in the old industrial heartlands who are locked out of good-quality employment. Those in rural areas and coastal towns suffer the worst outcomes.

Earlier research by the Commission exposed the staggering degree to which the commanding heights of our society remain stubbornly under the control of the privileged few. Its study of 4,000 leaders in politics, business, the media and other areas of public life revealed that 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior armed forces officers, 50% of members of the House of Lords, 45% of public body chairs, 44% of individuals on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists and 33% of MPs were educated at private schools – that compares to 7% of the population as a whole. Oxbridge, as you might expect, features heavily too.

The Commission also found that children’s future income was, in Britain more than in many other countries, determined by parental background.

More on Open vs Closed

Why the Open vs Closed debate is so deplorable

By Henry Olsen

”Twas ever thus,’ some might say. Indeed so. But today, those who run the establishment are united not merely by advantages of family affluence and education, but very often by opinion too. With many of them having been exposed to the radical nostrums of the cultural revolution that took hold in universities in the 1960s – and which were designed to supplant the traditional values held by millions of ordinary people – it is hardly a surprise that liberal tendencies tend to dominate among the modern elite.

This in turn has encouraged a rigid groupthink at the top, which can easily destroy the reputation and careers of those who violate it either innocently or through dissent. Witness, for example, the sacking of Nobel laureate Professor Tim Hunt for telling a silly joke about girls crying in the lab, or the forced resignation of Sarah Champion from the Labour front bench for offending the multiculturalists by drawing attention to the grooming exploits of British Pakistani men. Today’s establishment closed shop is filled with closed minds.

Almost comically, even our supposed anti-establishment protest groups – such as Momentum, whose co-founders Jon Lansman and James Schneider were educated at Highgate and Winchester respectively – are these days frequently led by the sons and daughters of the privileged.

All of this has led to a worsening social apartheid in the UK – an estrangement between the haves and have nots, the powerful and powerless, governors and governed. Across the piece, throughout politics, business and public institutions, our leaders have very little concept of (or affinity with) the lives of those over whom they rule, while those at the bottom look upwards and conclude that that way of life is ‘not for the likes of us’. The divide is profound, and widening.

And these working class communities feel abandoned by their own institutions of the Labour party and trade unions, which once fought their corner proudly but with their modern middle-class liberal inclinations now barely tolerate them. This divide has left the working classes unrepresented, and feeling there is no vehicle through which they might exercise any sort of political or economic clout in pursuance of their own interests.

We are expected to believe that Britain is more open, tolerant, meritocratic and inclusive than ever before. And for some, that is undoubtedly true. But for millions, the best opportunities in life remain beyond their reach, not through a lack of talent, but for reasons of wealth, privilege and geography. Britain is, for them, a closed shop – the shutters firmly down. And the privileged, ‘open’, few will not be extending an invitation to step inside any time soon.

Suggester reading

Why did union leaders abandon the workers?

By Paul Embery

Conveniently, this alternative to the traditional Left-Right spectrum has been adopted almost exclusively by those who purport to sit on the Open side of the fence. It is, in other words, a label that is at once flattering to half of the equation and damning to the other. Thus when the former Prime Minister Tony Blair (an early adopter of the term) declared in 2007 that the “real dividing line to think of in modern politics has… more to do today with… open versus closed”, it was clear which side he viewed himself and New Labour as being on.

In fairness, Closed is not a bad appellation when applied to anti-immigrant movements of the far Right. In defining themselves through virulent hostility toward both globalisation and immigration, much of the far Right wishes to retreat behind the comfort blanket of an idealised nation state, self-reliant and closed off to the outside world.

During her 2017 election campaign France’s far Right leader Marine Le Pen echoed those who say the old divisions have melted away and been replaced by something new. “There is no rightwing and no leftwing anymore,” she said, “there is only those who support globalisation and patriots.”

A division that may be useful in describing the extremes is, however, unhelpful when applied to the swathes of people who fall somewhere in between, particularly in Britain.

In this country it is more accurate to look at contemporary politics through the prism of social mobility. The extent to which a person is socially mobile even appears to dictate whether that person is likely to adopt some of the attitudes superficially associated with being Open or Closed – more on that later.

The prevailing view of social mobility in Britain is that there is less of it than, say, half a century ago. Everyone from the former Prime Minister John Major to the General Secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady have talked, respectively, of a “collapse” and a “reverse” in social mobility. This slots comfortably within the general mood of nostalgia that is engulfing politics – be it in the revived enthusiasm for grammar schools or nationalisation.

More on Open vs Closed

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Yet the notion of a golden era of social mobility is in some respects a myth built on the post-war expansion of the professions. The growth in white-collar occupations after the Second World War created more room at the top, and so a larger number of working class children were drawn into the middle classes. In other words, social mobility was predominantly driven by structural change, rather than any particular policy.

The big change today is the gulf between those who go to university and those who do not. As Professor Mike Savage of the London School of Economics notes in his exceptionally detailed book Social Class in the 21st Century: “there is a tightening association between graduate status and membership of the most advantaged groups in British society”.

Half a century ago it was the exception to go to university. Today, due to the professionalisation of many jobs and the expansion of higher education, it is unusual to encounter a young professional who has not gone to university. According to Savage, while just over half of what he defines as the “elite” have a degree, this figure increases to two-thirds for those aged between twenty-five and fifty.

Suggested reading

Slaying Dragons: Global Elite Condescension

By Henry Olsen

In one sense there really is a good deal of social mobility – it’s just contained within the middle and upper echelons of British society. As Savage puts it, a meritocratic “elite class has often achieved its advantaged economic position through performing well in the education system and then succeeding in the cut-throat world of high-level professional and managerial employment”.

Graduates, in contrast, are largely absent from the ‘precariat’ – typically unstable labour without pensions, holiday or sick pay – where the majority have no qualifications.

Moreover, the new meritocratic elite clusters around urban centres, particularly London, which “operates as the unquestioned centre of elite geography,” according to Savage.

The contemporary debate around Open versus Closed is focused almost entirely on those deemed Closed. Blame for the fact that many formerly industrial towns voted for Brexit is laid at the door of a sort of cultural malaise, where material explanations give way to a blame-game grounded in the allegedly ‘backward’, ‘regressive’ and ‘closed’ nature of certain communities and the people who live there. Our current political predicaments are thus attributed to a set of attitudes rather than any economic system or policy.

In this sense, Open versus Closed offers a convenient ideological model of the world for those who refuse to believe in any alternative to the status quo. After all, if Britain’s problems can be solved simply through a change of heart – an ‘opening’ of the mind to a different way of life – then little really needs to change at all, and certainly not for those who have done well out of the existing order.

Correspondingly, those who find themselves cut adrift in contemporary Britain – marooned in small towns where industry has been replaced by call centres, distribution sheds and supermarket checkouts – are effectively told that there is little to be in revolt about.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Yet these types of job – documented in more detail in my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low Wage Britain – are increasingly part of the life that awaits those without qualifications when they leave school. The fact that a growing number of young people also go to university – on the surface a good thing – compounds the sense of failure for those left behind, who no longer have many of the routes into skilled work that existed in the past.

To try and erect a dichotomy based solely on a supposed cultural chasm – the enlightened versus those who wish to stop the world and get off – misses something far more significant. If Open versus Closed has any value at all, it is in the fact that we have created a meritocratic order that is open to some while being firmly closed to others. Indeed, Open versus Closed is less useful as a marker of a person’s perceived enlightenment, than as a description of the barriers imposed on non-graduates by the professionalisation of our economy.

Black’s celebrated statement dates from 1971, when he was one of the Supreme Court arbiters in the pivotal legal dispute between US newspapers and the government. The New York Times and The Washington Post had published extracts from the Pentagon Papers – a top-secret study that proved hundreds of thousands of US troops had been sent to their deaths in the Vietnam war, despite official predictions America would ultimately lose.

Black’s words, which should be precious to all journalists, featured at the end of “The Post” – the recently Oscar-nominated movie starring Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, then Washington Post proprietor. By allowing editor Ben Bradlee to print the leaked documents, in defiance of President Nixon and much of US establishment, Graham risked not only her family’s newspaper and wealth, but also a stint in jail.

History now records, of course, that the Supreme Court found 6-3 against the government, exonerating The New York Times, The Washington Post and the regional papers that, in solidarity, followed up the Pentagon Papers story. But, at the time, Graham faced a genuine fork in the road. Her courageous choice, and the judiciary’s subsequent backing, was a victory for truth and liberty, but also democracy – the benefits of which spread across the Western world and are with us to this day.

Yet as I left the cinema last week, heady thoughts about press freedom, and Streep’s towering performance, were overcome by feelings of unease.

Yes, the press must “serve the governed, not the governors”, as Justice Black said – and, to some extent, the British press does. But do our newspapers and broadcast news bulletins really represent and reflect “the governed”? I don’t think they do. I’d say that British journalism is less representative of British society than when I became a journalist in the mid-1990s. And far less so than during my childhood.

Insider-Outsiders

I grew up thinking anyone could be a top-class journalist. I watched avidly as the BBC’s John Cole, in his famous herringbone jacket, opined from outside Downing Street during the 1980s. Through my own Irish family connections, I discovered Cole was the son of a Belfast electrical engineer who never went to university.

I devoured The Times, particularly the columns of Bernard Levin. (There were no broadsheets in my childhood home, but I read them on my morning paper round, making me late for school). Levin’s razor-sharp prose and disdain for authority were thrilling. Reading he was the son of a poor Jewish tailor, I sensed, even as a child, it was this “insider-outsider” status – on The Times staff, but from a properly gritty background – that made Levin the columnist he was. Perhaps there was a place for me.

The British media – newspapers in particular – used to be a route by which the sons and daughters of ‘ordinary’ families, if driven and talented, could rise from obscurity to prominence. Anyone doubting that should read Growing up Poor in London, the fascinating memoir of Louis Heren who, born into poverty in London’s East End, made the journey from messenger boy at The Times to Deputy Editor in the early 1970s.

The Cowardly Lioness by Jean Rook is a similar tale from a similar age, the precocious usherette’s daughter who blazed a trail from The Sheffield Telegraph via The Yorkshire Post to Fleet Street, never forgetting her unflashy Hull childhood. “Being Yorkshire is a bonus,” she wrote. “Yorkshire folk call a spade a spade and, when roused, dig the graves of those who irritate them”. At The Mail, and then The Express, Rook garnered countless millions of readers. From high politics to celebrity gossip, she wrote instinctively what much of the public was thinking because she was ultimately one of ‘them’.

British journalism was then more inclusive. The powerful, highly profitable regional newspapers – from Manchester to Glasgow, Leicester to Newcastle – were seedbeds of talent. Ambitious working-class youngsters could forge a career path from local papers to “the regionals”, with good rates of pay, with countless well-trained working-class children securing their berth on “a national”.

On arrival, they had not just reporting skills, determination and deep knowledge of specific parts of the country. They also brought, to London-based national newsrooms, a genuine understanding of the lives of everyday British people. These insights were brought to bear on their reporting and approach to covering the news.

In 1987, when I left school, some 70% of company CEOs went to private school according to a recent report from the government’s Social Mobility Commission ­– compared to just 7% of the broader population.[1. Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change, June 2017] By 2016, that figure had fallen to 34%, with corporate Britain better reflecting the country as a whole.

Journalism – apparently committed to justice and broad appeal – has gone in the opposite direction. Some 49% of journalists were privately educated in the late 1980s, rising to 51% by 2016. No less than 66% of journalists have parents in professional and managerial occupations, with just 12% from the working class.[2. Katherine Sellgren, ‘Social mobility: Class pay gap found in UK professions’, BBC News, 26 January 2017] In an industry that professes to reflect, empathise with and understand society as a whole, this is surely a disaster.

I come from an ordinary, non-professional background, and was the first person in my family to go to university. Aged 10, after some heartfelt creative writing in an entrance exam and a feisty interview, I won a life-changing scholarship to public school.

Yet my own experience working at some of the UK’s leading newspapers and broadcasters since the mid-1990s, tells me that while issues of gender and racial diversity are being addressed, diversity in terms of class is getting worse.

Yes, there are a fair few smart, working-class people shooting TV news pictures, subbing copy and composing graphics behind the scenes. But the named writers and on-screen ‘talent’ are still overwhelmingly from well-connected, often gilded, families, almost always from the South East.

I don’t want to sound chippy. My Kingsbury upbringing didn’t stop me becoming a national newspaper columnist or securing an on-screen job at Channel Four News. I worked hard and made my own luck. But my concern is for my equivalent today. For it strikes me that a young boy from a working class background, sat reading and dreaming in a box-room, looking out over an anonymous suburb, would have far less chance than I did. And perhaps no chance at all.

Class Action

Anita Rani, a BBC presenter born to a Hindu father and Sikh mother in Bradford, herself privately educated, last year said the much-discussed pay gap at the UK’s iconic broadcaster is as much about class and race as gender.[3. ‘BBC pay: Anita Rani ‘disappointed’ by race and class gap’, BBC News, 4 August 2017] In February, Stephanie McGovern, another BBC presenter, proudly Middlesbrough-born and of “working-class stock”, observed she “would earn more if she was posher”.[4. Steve Schofield, ‘Steph McGovern: I’m not posh so the BBC pays me less’, The Times 25 February 2018] Having spent more than two decades knocking about the UK media industry, I think Rani and McGovern are right. But my concern here is more about access for working class journalists rather than pay.

I accept that newspapers are financially challenged, not least because of the tech-onslaught – with the likes of Facebook and Google taking the bulk of the money. The hollowing-out of the regional and national press has hit budgets and staff numbers, and therefore opportunities.

I also acknowledge that some newspapers and broadcasters are now shying away from the unpaid internships that help well-healed, connected newcomers with South-Eastern parental homes get that all-important foot in the door, while leaving working-class regional hopefuls behind.

But the UK media, and its US counterpart, is still increasingly failing to understand ‘ordinary’ people because there are so few of them at or near the top of the industry, where decisions are made. The media classes consistently under-estimate the intelligence of those in non-professional jobs, eschewing complexity because they assume – wrongly, in my experience – that the punters can’t understand or are uninterested in policy detail.

The British media, now taking long-overdue steps to tackle gender and race discrimination, must tackle with even greater urgency the entrenched and endemic issue of discrimination by social class.

We need more ordinary people writing columns – before newspaper commentary, particularly cultural commentary, is reduced to nothing but the lifestyle choice of the listless children of the ‘one percent’.

We need more reporters on our screens and airwaves who sound like ordinary people. This is no longer the 1950s, yet received pronunciation remains always ubiquitous. Why?

And, above all, we need to bring back into our journalism the influence of driven, worldly-wise writers and broadcasters from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds. For it is such gifted, restless characters, more than any others, who give meaningful journalism its all-important edge.

In “The Post”, Steven Spielberg tells the story of a woman from America’s affluent high society – albeit one who, when tested, risked her privileged status, and even her personal liberty, to print the urgent truth. For that, Katharine Graham deserves the utmost credit.

But the reason the Pentagon Papers story happened, and Graham was faced with her historic dilemma, was the dogged determination of two ‘insider-outsider’ reporters with a huge stake in American democracy. One was Ben Bagdikian of The Washington Post, who came to the US as an infant refugee from the Armenian genocide. The other was Neil Sheehan of The New York Times, the son of Irish immigrant farmers.

Could such people now fight their way in, becoming top reporters at the doyenne British or American titles today? I don’t think so. Are our newspapers, our media industry and broader democracy now benefiting from the street smarts, drive and flat-out determination of such extraordinary ‘ordinary people’? I think not.