Читать книгу Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England - Nick Cohen - Страница 9

MIDDLE-CLASS HATRED of the upper class used to erupt regularly in Britain. From 1815 to 1914, it inspired the campaigns against rotten boroughs, the Corn Laws and the House of Lords. It rages in novels from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, sometimes as a dominant theme, as in Nicholas Nickleby, for example, more often in the background, as in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Today, the old anger seems dead. People talk with passion about the gap between the top and the bottom—between rich and poor—but not the gap between the top and the middle. The only modern writer I can think of who uses middle-class fury at the privileges of the rich in most of his plots is James Hawes. His typical character realises that working hard and playing by the rules will never get him the family home in a nice area the middle-class children of the seventies took to be their due.

To join the ranks of the respectable he has to stop being respectable. He must rob a bank, cut a deal with the Russian mafia or humiliate himself on a reality Tff show. The system is stacked against him, as the graduate hero of his 1996 A White Merc with Fins explains, after learning that the children of the rich he thought of as friends at university are from a world whose admission price he cannot afford.

You have slept about and hitched around and your body-clock is locked into the chimes of midnight and the long, slow summers, and now that you have just about realised who you actually are, or might be, you have to go and be an accountant or a schoolteacher or work for ICI developing brave new deodorants.

Fair enough?

What?

Suddenly, the brief yoof-socialist near-equality of college is gone: the nice guy who had the crap old funny GTi is off to see America, the nice girl who subbed your drug experiments has gone to Mum’s spare flat in South Ken to look up some pals in publishing, and little you are left high and dry, wilting towards teacher-training, accountancy or the dole office.

Mum, Dad!

The Imperfectly Launched Young Adults swarm home for more money.

Except Mum and Dad have no money.

A decade on, his angry young man is as likely to be an angry young woman. She hears that nearly everyone is middle class now, but experience shows her there is middle class and then there is Middle-Class. Her parents have modest savings, and helped a little with tuition fees—but that was it. She still left university with a pile of debt and a degree that was next to worthless because so many of her contemporaries had one too. Like the nurse I met who spat tacks at how the children of editors and celebrity columnists had an entrée to careers that weren’t open to the likes of her, our heroine had ambitions to go into the glamorous world of media London. She found that to gain admission she needed to fund not only a first degree but a postgraduate degree as well. After she had paid for her training, editors told her they still would not give her a job that would allow her to pay the bills and repay her debts. She would first have to endure what they quaintly described as ‘work experience’, a refined version of slavery. She would work for nothing for six months, a year or however long it took an editor to condescend to hire her. Unsurprisingly our heroine cannot think of taking the media up on its generous offer because she does not have a private income and cannot afford to live without a wage.

She realises that in the culture industries—publishing, theatre, Tff, radio, film-making, the fine arts and the serious newspapers—it helps to have a mummy with a spare flat in South Ken, and if Mummy’s friends are also your prospective employers, all the better. In 1936, George Orwell complained about ‘snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews’. The beasts are gliding again. I’m not saying it is impossible to get a job in the arts or the media without family money and connections, but when I meet a graduate with a familiar name at a party, I no longer bother to ask if they are X’s daughter or Y’s son. The question is superfluous.

When the BBC exploded into one of the world’s most interesting arts institutions in the sixties, innovation came from grammar-school-educated producers and writers from modest backgrounds. At first glance, modern British institutions still seem determined to foster egalitarianism. Diversity is king at the BBC and elsewhere. To be accused of racism, sexism or homophobia is a career-breaking charge. Yet look closer at the men and women who make the decisions. The working-class boys are long gone and the managers’ diverse appearance conceals a uniform background in the moneyed class. In the name of diversity, everyone is the same. They will argue for positive discrimination to compensate for sex or race or sexual orientation or disability…but for class, never.

The striking difference with Orwell’s day is that the Cambridge graduates produce Big Brother and Ant and Dec.* I can’t say that’s an advance, although obviously there is more money in it for the beasts. From a class point of view, churning out pap that keeps ordinary children stupid can also help the beasts’ own children beat them in the competition for jobs a generation down the line. A Tff producer, who once believed the media was honourable, told me how his child’s sixth birthday party opened his eyes. He had hired an entertainer for the sons and daughters of other television executives. The act flopped. ‘Don’t worry,’ the entertainer told him, ‘I’ll get them to guess Tff theme tunes. That always makes them happy.’ For once, his sure-fire hit failed. The children stared blankly at the wretched man as he played the jingles for Hollyoaks and Emmerdale. My friend learned then what he ought to have guessed years before: television executives do not allow their children to watch the programmes they push at the masses.

Despairing of ever working for Channel 4 or Tate Modern, our young woman decides on an ordinary middle-class career. Maybe she joins the public sector as a teacher, or becomes an administrative officer for a private firm. She is bright and competent and is soon earning £35,000—well above the average salary. Yet she does not feel remotely well off because the gap between what she earns and what her bosses earn is enormous. Local authority chief executives are making £150,000. The average salary of a corporate chief executive is £550,000, even though neither our young woman nor any reputable economist can find a correlation between their pay and performance. The gap between £35,000 and £550,000 is not a difference within the middle class; it is an unbridgeable gulf between classes.

Part of her grievance is due, no doubt, to the greed of the consumer society that writers for the liberal press denounce with such gusto. The British Market Research Bureau agrees and says that the middle classes are in the grip of what it calls ‘luxury fever’. Nearly half of those earning more than £35,000 a year, and 40 per cent earning over £50,000, told its researchers they felt ‘deprived’ because they couldn’t afford ‘essential’ purchases such as Jaguars, cosmetic surgery and kitchens with enormous cookers and bigger fridges. The Bureau blamed the media, as everyone does, for spreading decadent tastes and giving the middle classes ideas above their station. In the past, they ‘set their aspirations for their standard of living by their own social class, and the people around them’. Now they want it all.

Such jeremiads contain a portion of truth—you have only to look at the debt burden to know that—but blaming greed and the media misses the crucial change in British middle-class life of the late twentieth century.

Sociologists would have classified many of today’s rich as middle class thirty years ago. Then the council’s chief officer did not earn five times as much as the teacher; the chief executive did not earn sixteen times as much as the bright graduate in personnel. Thatcherism made them wealthy for no better reason than they happened to be sitting behind a manager’s desk when their industry was privatised or public service commercialised. Conspicuous consumption with so little economic justification was bound to turn middle-class heads.

Nor do lamentations about selfishness take account of the greatest cause of class tension between the top and the middle: the unselfish act of having and rearing children.

For some time now, women writers across Fleet Street have been repeating the same anecdote in angry columns. City dealers with six-or seven-figure bonuses are flaunting their wealth by having four or more children. A large family shows that the hedge-fund manager or venture capitalist makes enough for his wife to stay at home—with ample support staff—and for him to educate his brood privately. The story is popping up everywhere because it hits the most sensitive of nerves. In the twenty-first century, having children comes as naturally to the rich and to the poor as it always has, but our middle-class woman is likely to get in all kinds of trouble if she wants to follow suit.

First, she will have difficulties with men, which other women don’t have to lose sleep over. The brute economic fact is that a single mother on a council estate does not have to worry about the financial cost of a father abandoning his children because the state will pay for them. Equally, the wife of the hedge-fund manager may not be happy if her husband runs off with a girl from Lloyd’s, but her lawyers will make her feel better by taking a fortune from him in alimony. By contrast, a middle-class woman does not want to raise children alone on a council estate, but she cannot be sure of having the money to raise children in comfort if her partner leaves. Alimony from her ex will not be enough to adequately support her and her children. Even if she is confident that her partner will stay with her, they will still have to find a decent home, and if she lives in London, the South-East, Edinburgh and, increasingly, Leeds and Manchester, decent homes are beyond her means.

This combination of social and financial pressures has produced one of the most familiar figures of our time: the middle-aged, middle-class woman being prodded by fertility doctors because finding a home she can raise children in and a man she can raise them with has taken her such a long time—perhaps too long a time. She may not be starving in Darfur or living in a Glasgow slum, but suffering is not a competition and her misery remains real.

If the test results come in positive and she is still lucky enough to be able to have children, she will confront an education system that, despite stiff competition, remains the crowning glory of English hypocrisy. The best schools are likely to be in the private system, and she cannot afford to send her children there. If she stays in the state system—as she must—she will find it is nowhere near as egalitarian as it pretends to be. If she cannot afford to meet the inflated price of a house in the catchment area of a good comprehensive, her children will be disadvantaged for life.

What will she make of her country by the time she has experienced university, work and motherhood? She may well have found that wealth determines what job she can get, where she can live, when and if she can have children and whether her children will receive a good education. Ever since the eighties, the voices of the consensus have told us that the ‘politics of envy’ is dead. Margaret Thatcher’s triumph was to make people admire the wealthy and wish to emulate them. But the achievement of Thatcherism was double-edged. In the seventies, union militancy pushed large sections of the middle class, and many in the working class, to the right. Now the main threat to middle-class interests is from the rich.

It is not a conspiracy. Employers are not consciously excluding young people on modest means, just taking advantage of the mismatch between supply and demand. The media grandees who pump out trash they would never allow their own children to watch are not plotting to keep people stupid, just giving the market what it wants. Supporters of comprehensives believe in equality and never ask why, in eighteen years of power, Tories never insisted on a return to selection by ability in state schools.

When he was young, Tony Blair knew how the system frustrated middle-class hopes. The snag for Labour is that his behaviour is now an affront to middle-class values. He made it clear that he wanted to join the super-rich for whom taxes are what the little people pay. His party sold them peerages, his ministers’ spouses advised them on how to shift their fortune from tax haven to tax haven. So accustomed has New Labour become to the world of the wealthy that it mistakes it for the whole world. A mistake I suspect the middle classes will make it pay for one day.

New Statesman, March 2006

* The man behind Big Brother, Peter Bazalgette (Dulwich College and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge), was the great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who designed the London sewers. ‘He’s undoing all his great-grandfather’s work by pumping shit back into our homes,’ said Stephen Fry.