Читать книгу Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England - Nick Cohen - Страница 8

TO SAY THAT today’s Britain is a class-ridden country dominated by hereditary elites is to invite incredulous ridicule. No one in a position of power supports privilege any more. John Major announced his determination to achieve a ‘classless society’ more than a decade ago. Tony Blair declared in 1997 that ‘the Britain of the elite is over’. In the 2005 election campaign, New Labour announced that it was on the side of ‘hard-working families’ while the old Tories claimed to be the voice of ‘the forgotten majority’. Both agreed that the old notions of hierarchy were dead.

Once the newspapers the British read and the television programmes they watched were social markers. Today the old gap between middle and upmarket newspapers is vanishing, and if it were not for the ads, no one would be able to tell the difference between the BBC and commercial television. When what we once called ‘society’ drops its aitches and affects an estuary accent, it is possible to imagine a future when the queen will be the last person left speaking the Queen’s English.

All social and cultural institutions are emphatic in their commitment to egalitarianism.* The BBC’s Diversity Unit promises not only to tackle colour prejudice, but an apparently exhaustive list of other bigotries about ‘age, gender, race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, marital status, sexual orientation and number of dependants’. In Whitehall, the Civil Service says it will end the under-representation of women and members of ethnic minorities among its upper ranks. The NHS announces that its ambitions are not limited to the petty task of providing care for the sick, free at the point of delivery. It intends to go farther and create ‘a fairer society in which everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their potential’.

A foreigner who hears the declarations of solidarity with the masses would assume this country was in the grip of red revolution, so thoroughly does the egalitarian style dominate public life. Radical human-resources managers and anti-elitist mandarins make good money out of a career in leftism, as long as they never talk about the old left’s central concern: class. For embarrassingly good reasons it has become unmentionable.

In the late fifties, Harold Macmillan found ministerial jobs for the duke of Devonshire and the noble Lords Carrington, Dundee, Gosford, Home, Lansdowne and Munster. In 2004 Cherie Blair said, ‘Whoever’s calling the shots in this country, it isn’t the people on the grouse moor.’ Indeed it is not; the aristocratic order and the old class system are gone. But here’s what is odd: a child born in 1958 into the Britain of Harold Macmillan and his dukes and lords was far more likely to break away from his class and pursue a career that reflected his talents than a child born in 1970. As John Major’s classless society dawned, class divisions were hardening. The more Tony Blair insisted that elitism was over, the prouder elites became.

Far from being a meritocracy, Britain has become a country of castes, and the divisions between them are widening with each decade. The children of the rich remain rich when they grow up. The children of graduates graduate themselves; meanwhile the children of the working and lower-middle classes sink ever farther into financial and intellectual impoverishment.

A series of studies for the Sutton Trust looked at the fate of newborn children through schooling to adulthood. On average, a boy born to a well-to-do family in 1958 earned 17.5 per cent more than a boy born to a family on half the income. If the equivalent Mr and Mrs Moneybags produced a son in 1970, he would grow up to earn 25 per cent more than his contemporary from the wrong side of the tracks. In other words, far from decreasing, the class advantage of those born to wealth grew as the second half of the twentieth century progressed.

However they measure class, statisticians have found that the huge university expansion of the past twenty years has disproportionately benefited the children of the already well off. The gap between the higher-education participation rates of the working and middle classes is now wider than ever.

The effort that New Labour has put into increasing the chances of the poor—all Gordon Brown’s Sure Start schemes and measures to redistribute wealth—has merely slowed the march of inequality.*

There are few signs that it is slowing in the twenty-first century. I suppose it is possible that upper-middle-class parents working full time to maximise their income, and contracting out their childcare to east European nannies, will be handicapping the prospects of the next generation of rich kids. Babies raised by Bulgarians may not have the linguistic and cultural advantages of their parents. Even if that risk arises, I am sure that private tutors and private schools will fill the gaps in their early education.

The economic reasons for our sclerotic society are easy to grasp—money begets money. The rich pass on their wealth and its rewards to their children. The explosion of wealth at the top of society has left social mobility far more constricted in ‘classless’ Britain than in the more egalitarian economies of Germany, Canada and Scandinavia. The greatest myth of the free-market right is that its policies allow the poorest child to go from rags to riches. Healthy societies have few citizens in either rags or riches.

Economics alone cannot explain why the children of the poor are finding it ever more difficult to move on, however. As the saying goes, the right won the economic war and the left won the cultural war; and it is in the confusions of liberal-dominated cultural life that the second set of explanations for middle-class dominance can be found.

I have written as if it were obvious that social mobility was worth having, but in the twentieth century, the left was far from sure that it was. Michael Young in his Rise of the Meritocracy of 1958 put the case against. He was nervous about a future where the rich believed they had earned the right to be rich because of their inherent merits and the poor believed that their poverty was their own fault. Better to have an aristocracy that feels guilty about its luck in being born to wealth and power than a world where winners and losers believe they have received their just deserts. The poor would still be poor but they could find consolation in the thought that they were the victims of an unjust social order rather than their own failings.

Young’s ideas helped pushed Labour to abolish grammar schools. Many Tories took up the cause. They grasped that if you combine a comprehensive state system with a selective private system—as Britain and America do—you have the rich parents’ dream. If their children are bright, they go to a good private school. Competition for places is fierce, but the field is limited by the parents’ ability to pay. If their children are clots, their wealth can still be decisive because it allows them to move into the expensive catchment areas of the best comprehensives. Either way, money talks, and poor but talented children are confined to the worst schools. For all his erudition, Young was a fool not to realise that, in the name of equality, the wealthy could exploit the education system.

The unintended consequences of egalitarianism in education would not have mattered so much if they did not coincide with wider cultural changes that were profoundly hostile to the working class. At the end of his Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose asked why 200 years of self-improvement through libraries, lectures, schools and newspapers organised by and for the working class stopped in the sixties. His conclusion was that the supposedly egalitarian assault on the ‘dead white men’ of the classics served only to increase middle-class privilege. When there was agreement on the canon, when society accepted that, for example, you could not be educated without knowing Shakespeare, there was a clear path for the self-taught to follow if they wanted to catch up. Since the sixties, however, the canon has been careering around the deck. Cultural trends have had ‘as brief a shelf-life as stock-exchange trends, and they depreciate rapidly if one fails to catch the latest wave in architecture or literary theory,’ Rose noted. The eruptions of faddism—avant-garde, progressive, le dernier cri, new wave, modernist, postmodernist—‘reflect the Anxiety of Cool, the relentless struggle to get out in front and control the production of new cultural information’.

Each new wave carries fashionable ‘high’ culture farther away from the working class. Once, the middle-class left saw the workers as the very vanguard of history; now it dismisses them as sexist, racist and conservative. Rose searched a database of academic books published between 1991 and 2000. He got 13,820 hits for ‘women’, 4539 for ‘gender’, 1826 for ‘race’, 710 for ‘post-colonial’ and a piddling 136 for ‘working class’.

It should not be a surprise that the lower orders do not care about education, when the educated care so little for them.

New Statesman, March 2005

* And I mean all. In 2005 the Lake District National Park threatened to cancel its guided treks up the fells because too many ramblers were ‘middle-aged, middle-class and white’. ‘Ethnic minorities and people with disabilities’ were not willing (or able, I guess, in the case of the disabled) to take to the hills, and so the walks must stop.

* In 2008 a grateful government seized on a report that showed family background seemed to have become less significant in determining children’s GCSE performance, prompting a minister to claim there were ‘signs of good news’. Well, maybe. As the report’s authors said, the clutch of policies Labour introduced may have a lasting impact on social mobility for children born after 2000. But, ‘it is a bit premature to claim a big success’.