This is a selection of responses to the March cover story by James Crabtree and Frank Field. To read the article in full click here.
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A misconceived scheme
13th March 2009
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Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Political oxymorons are the new black. “Libertarian paternalism” under Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, now “progressive conservatism” under Phillip Blond. I had trouble with the first and am having even more trouble with the second. Renewed inventiveness in the face of crisis? The telltale signs of ideological bankruptcy—or vote-seeking fancy dress?
Don’t get me wrong, Demos, where Blond is now based, has always been the place where easy oppositions were explored and ultimately dismantled; where intuition was tested and then often shown to be incorrect and a hindrance to creativity and progress. So, it isn’t surprising that the Conservatives’ current attempt at disguise should pique Demos’s curiosity and set an appetising challenge. However, I suggest that Red Toryism is an oxymoron best left alone. Not simply because the terms are incompatible, or the goal unattainable, but because calling the end product anything approximating progress simply strikes me as wrong.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
America has elected not just a black president but a leader who is the son of a single mother who was, at least briefly, dependent on food stamps. It couldn’t happen here, says the political and media consensus in Britain which alleges that social mobility ground to a halt sometime in the 1980s, after a brief golden age in the 1950s and 1960s.
Not everyone agrees with that consensus. “There really has been a lot of nonsense talked about the death of mobility,” says the eminent sociologist John Goldthorpe. He is himself a beneficiary of social mobility, having been born 73 years ago in south Yorkshire, the son of a colliery clerk. He rose via Wath on Dearne grammar school (attended 25 years later, then a comprehensive, by William Hague) to University College, London. As a young sociologist he wrote a famous study of affluent workers in Luton and went on to become one of the world’s most respected academic analysts of social mobility.
Fifty years ago, the sociologist Michael Young—my father—published a book that, in his own words, gave him a minor claim to immortality. A dystopian satire in the same vein as 1984, it was an attempt to sound a warning bell about various social and political trends by describing a future in which they had come to fruition. It wasn’t as successful as Orwell’s book, but it did enjoy some afterlife thanks to a word my father coined to describe the new ruling class that would hold sway in this nightmarish future. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy.
People are often surprised when I tell them that my father invented the word “meritocracy”—they assume it must have been around for ever—and even more astonished to learn that he wasn’t a fan. How could anyone be against meritocracy? It seems incomprehensible today. The commitment to making Britain more meritocratic has become an ideological shibboleth that almost no one dissents from.
Michael disapproved of meritocracy because he saw it as a way of legitimising inequality. After all, if everyone starts out on a level playing field, then the resulting allocation of rewards—however unequal—seems fair. Those at the very pinnacle of our society might not inherit their privileged position, as their forebears had done, but its pyramid-like shape would be preserved. Indeed, once this hierarchical structure became legitimised, as it would in a meritocratic society, it was likely that power and wealth would become concentrated in even fewer hands.
Does an education at an elite public school diminish a politician’s legitimacy? Gordon Brown’s dismissal of David Cameron as “just an Old Etonian” signifies not just his view that products of privilege have no place in politics, but also that the electorate will, as a matter of course, reject him ab initio because of his background.
Boris Johnson’s election as mayor of London appears to have put paid to that idea. There could hardly be a more caricature Old Etonian than the foppish Johnson, but it did not stop voters in the most cosmopolitan city in the world from electing him. Far from seeing him as a pre-modern relic, they relished his postmodern idiosyncrasy.
It is difficult to understand why some people have a problem with a political system in which the products of privilege involve themselves in politics. First, to put this in the proper context, the influence of public schooling on the Conservative party hasn’t increased, it has sharply declined: the percentage of privately educated MPs in the shadow cabinet is, at 62 per cent, lower than any (actual) Tory cabinet from 1938 to 1992; John Major’s was 80 per cent privately educated. The only two old Etonians in the shadow cabinet are Cameron and Oliver Letwin. Heath’s cabinet was 22 per cent old Etonian, Thatcher’s 20 per cent.
The phrase “period costume drama” could have been invented for the purpose of damning with faint praise. As in: “Period costume dramas are what the BBC excels at”—a comment which often implies that since costume dramas are all the BBC does well, it is these that they should concentrate on, and that anyway they are not that hard to pull off. It’s a remark often associated with anti-BBC sentiment. So when the corporation unveiled its Cranford series—based on the mid-19th century works of Elizabeth Gaskell—there were predictable mutterings that it was a safe, unsurprising production aimed at middle England. In fact, Cranford was a triumph: a complex creative challenge which took risks and was rewarded with a large audience.
The series was based on three of Gaskell’s works—the novel Cranford, the long novella My Lady Ludlow (”the least regarded” of Gaskell’s books, according to her biographer Jenny Uglow) and the short story “Mr Harrison’s Confessions.” Adapting them for television cannot have been easy. The books all have different narrators and there is no crossover of characters—”Mr Harrison’s Confessions” was not even set in Cranford.
The novel Cranford started life as a serial in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words in 1851. Some characters only lasted one instalment—notably Captain Brown, who appears in the first chapter and causes considerable disruption to Cranford both by behaving above himself and by being an employee of a railway company whose plan to build a railroad through the town is opposed by the locals. Brown has two daughters—the ill Mary and her sister Jessie, who looks after her. Captain Brown and Mary die in quick succession and Jessie marries her old flame, Major Gordon. All this happens in the first story in the Household Words series (something which Mrs Gaskell later claimed to regret, writing that she “killed Capt Brown very much against my will”). In the television series, Captain Brown appears in all the episodes. His daughter Mary pre-deceases him, he frustrates the? marriage of Jessie and it only gradually emerges that he is connected to the railway company.
Two nations stood vigil at the death bed of Frank Johnson in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital late last year. On the one side were the Frasers, the grand Scottish Catholic family into which he married, and the professional friends of a lifetime in journalism, such as Peregrine Worsthorne and Charles Moore. On the other side were Johnson’s blood relatives: the former east Londoners or, as the Labour politician Ray Gunter might have put it, the “people from whence I came.” It would not quite be true to say that the twain had never met—but the encounters were few and far between.
The scene resembled the final moments of a medieval magnate, surrounded by grieving women, fellow knights and assorted retainers: Torrigiano would have made the most of that handsome face tilted back upon the high pillows for one of his effigies. All that was missing was the dog at the foot of the bed. The historian Kenneth Rose—no mean judge of such things—once said that Johnson had one of the most patrician aspects he had ever seen.
The obituaries made much of the romantic pageant of Johnson’s life—the son of a chef who left school at 16 and rose to some of the top positions in Fleet Street; the 11-plus failure who self-educated himself into polymathy.
My husband and I were walking in circles around Regent’s park the day after the May local elections, having the same conversation we have when we’re walking, drinking in the pub, or having dinner at home: the one about the workers. About how we hold such high hopes for the people we grew up among, and how they always, ultimately, disappoint us. About how we both feel a tangled mix of shame and pride in our origins, combined with guilt and pleasure at having escaped them.
That day, the BNP had won its first Midlands council seat outside the Black Country, in the ward that comprised the council estate where I spent 17 of the first 18 years of my life. To say I was disappointed is like saying I was “disappointed” to see Birmingham City get relegated from the Premiership. I was hysterical: despite the fact that I left the estate 12 years ago, it has cast a long shadow over my adult life. I felt soiled and humiliated and, for some reason, implicated in a result that was decided by just over 700 people among several thousands (the desire to exercise one’s vote on this estate has never been particularly strong), in a place where I no longer lived.
“It’s not your fault,” said my husband, clearly feeling the need to state the obvious.
The debate over identity and Britishness has been raging in Britain over the last few years, and with particular urgency since last year’s London bombings. These issues of identity extend to a common social challenge. Over the next generation in Britain we must re-learn how to live together successfully. The solution I advocate is not to pretend that everybody can feel the same affinity with all identities outside their own, but to build an “encounter culture” in which it becomes easier and more rewarding to interact with and respect others.
This is not just about government and public policy; it is personal, cultural, civic. The starting point is the recognition that it affects everybody. As a black MP representing one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the UK, people often assume that when I address these issues, I am talking primarily about race. But look beyond race, at the hundreds of thousands who have joined Countryside Alliance marches in recent years, for example, driven in part by the perception that the urban majority do not understand their culture and values. Or look at inter-generational conflict. We know that every generation laments the declining moral standards of the one that comes after it. But the intensity of public feeling aroused by anti-social behaviour, and the widely held perception that legal sanctions like Asbos are necessary, seems to represent an unusually sharp divide. Look forward a generation to the potential conflict of resources over pensions, social care, the costs of climate change and so on, and you may wonder which loyalties will be most influential in determining people’s attitudes to the distribution of those resources.
One of the defining characteristics of contemporary British society is its social diversity. Identities—whether based on occupation, class, faith, or territory—that once perpetuated themselves by being passed automatically from one generation to the next have become more fragmented and conditional, and in some cases disappeared altogether. In a globalised, consumerist society, identity seems much less something we inherit and increasingly something we can choose, shape or discard. We go on six times more foreign holidays that we did in 1971. We travel seven miles further each week to visit friends than we did in the 1980s. We spend eight times longer online per week than we did in the late 1990s. This is the paradox Manuel Castells identified when he wrote about “the net and the self.” On the one hand, we have an urge to affirm our own individuality and differentiate ourselves from some of the more suffocating aspects of our traditional identities. On the other, this is offset by a continuing human need to belong, to remain anchored in something collective.
The east end of London has for centuries been one of the poorest, most marginalised corners of Britain. A new book by researchers attached to the Young Foundation, The New East End, explores 50 years of social change in Tower Hamlets from the 1950s to the late 1990s. The story is one of heavy population turnover, conflict between newcomers and old-timers—relieved to some extent by personal ties and friendships—and above all the betrayal of poor people by those in positions of power over them.
Our story begins with the world explored by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in their famous book Family and Kinship in East London (1957). The book described a community that was closely knit, primarily by mothers and by the kinship networks that helped people to cope with adversity.
Young and Willmott’s research was done at a time of great optimism. The east end had suffered acutely during the depression and the war. But its very visible role during the blitz made local people national heroes. The sense of wartime solidarity and the promise of a new society, with the establishment of the welfare state, gave eastenders a feeling that they were at last being admitted into the nation as full, equal citizens.
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