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MERITOCRACY IS THE LAST THING BRITAIN NEEDS

Philip Collins

SEPTEMBER 16 2016

“IT IS NOT ENOUGH to succeed. Others must fail.” Gore Vidal’s waspish hopes for his friends captures, in an epigram, why Theresa May does not really mean what she says about meritocracy. Meritocracy does not mean meritocracy. At the beginning of their time in office every prime minister has to make the meritocracy speech. The ardour always fades because, looked at straight on, meritocracy is a radical and terrifying idea.

The term itself was designed as a warning rather than an aspiration. Michael Young wrote The Rise Of The Meritocracy in 1958 to raise the alarm that a society based on a narrow definition of merit, embodied in an intelligence test at an early age, is a terrible place to live. Young’s meritocracy descends into disorder as the sheep and the goats start to fight. There is nothing wrong, of course, with a weaker version of meritocracy in which talent and effort are rewarded to a greater extent than their opposites. This is what every prime minister is initially getting at, translated into the bloodless jargon of social mobility. But even that they cannot really mean.

This is why we have been treated to yet another turn of the wheel for the over-sold hysteria about grammar schools. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair one of his first acts was to reform the royal prerogative powers, such as the declaration of war, that are carried out by the prime minister. Theresa May’s exhuming of grammar schools prompted the same thought I had then: is that all you’ve got? If a few grammar schools is all you’re about, then you’re not really about much. This will not be the full return of the binary distinction between grammars and secondary moderns. The school system is too diverse for that.

Besides, Mrs May’s advisers know all the objections to grammar schools. They know the cause of social mobility in the 1960s was the conversion of Britain, between the end of the First World War and the end of that decade, from an essentially blue-collar economy into a mostly white-collar one. Suddenly there was more room at the top. Grammar schools coincided with this change but did not cause it. At the height of their popularity, of the grammar school children who gained two A levels, less than 1 per cent came from the skilled working class.

This is a point so well established that it enabled even Jeremy Corbyn to get the better of Mrs May at PMQs this week. After the beating, Mrs May’s spokesman was unable to cite any evidence in support of her policy. That’s because there isn’t any.

That has not prevented plenty of Tory MPs and columnists from elevating their autobiographies to the status of policy writ. There really is no more firmly established body of evidence in all of education. So why does it have to be said over and over? Are these Tories so arrogant that they are impervious to evidence? No, they just don’t know what they are talking about. They are simply observing that there were more people mobile in their generation and ascribing that fact, wrongly, to schools.

The government’s green paper actually admits its own problem: “Under the current model of grammar schools … there is … evidence that children who attend non-selective schools in selective areas may not fare as well academically — both compared to local selective schools and comprehensives in non-selective areas.” The rest of the document is then an attempt to salvage selection from the jaws of this yawning disaster. The upshot will be that the conditions imposed on schools before they can opt to select will be so severe by the time the bill limps through parliament that there will be little incentive to do so. Most of the large academy chains have no need of selection. Mrs May’s speech on meritocracy was a grand vision saddled to a sorry policy.

The fabled popular demand will dissipate too. Grammars were not abolished by Tony Crosland in a fit of socialist envy. They were closed by Margaret Thatcher because of middle-class parents complaining to local authorities that their children were not getting in. Young put the politics of grammar schools perfectly: “Every selection of one is a rejection of many.” Meritocracy has the unfortunate effect of making aspiration a zero-sum game. My very stupid children (well, not mine, yours), with all their good fortune, will have to fall down a snake while your bright poor child climbs a ladder. No ordinary middle-class parent is going to stand idly by while that happens. It therefore follows that the policy meritocrat will have to commit to some policies even more unpalatable than grammar schools.

There is in fact a Meritocracy Party in Britain, which demands that the Queen abdicate and that only those with relevant experience, which would presumably include the Queen (Tory), be permitted to vote. They want inheritance tax at 100 per cent. I may have earned the money but my children have not and if advantage can be purchased, which it can, then the transfer from me to them impairs the principle of merit.

Advantage goes back a long way. In 1693 John Locke wrote a parenting guide, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The best recommendation was that children should eat no vegetables but the rest has worn well. Locke points out that good citizens are created by good parents and it’s still true. Educated parents are marrying their own kind and talking to their children. High-income parents talk with their school-aged children for three hours more per week than low-income parents. By the age of three a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.

It matters. How children perform in tests when they are three and a half is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. The best way to predict a person’s social position at the age of 19 is attainment at 16, which in turn is best foretold by attainment at 11. And you can tell who is going to do well at 11 simply by looking up who did well at seven. A meritocracy would therefore withdraw resources from the later years of life and spend earlier in the life cycle. The only government member I recall taking this seriously is a little-remembered person by the name of Andrea Leadsom.

The regime in Young’s Rise Of The Meritocracy collapses when the government takes the children of the poor into care to ensure equality of opportunity. Every politician wants the soft version of meritocracy in which the poor do well but nobody suffers. It’s a fantasy and that is why the pertinent response to Mrs May is not hysteria about a return to the 1950s but simply this: is that all you’ve got?