Will Irwin
All we are saying is give Prospect an interview
It’s always nice to be talked about. And, with the latest Prospect about to hit the shops—out tomorrow, and hopefully on the doorsteps of subscribers this morning—we thought we should see what people have been saying about us this last month.
Our interview with Sir Paul McCartney (in the new edition) has been widely trailed, with a bunch of headlines in last Sunday’s newspapers, and more responses from various commentators. The Sunday Times had it on the front page, followed up by The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Mail. All four cherry-picked Sir Paul’s claims about introducing his fellow Beatles to the Vietnam war. The Lennon-McCartney relationship seems enduringly fascinating, and their Vietnam tussles make a nice addition to other relationship undercurrents, adding political rivalry to “who wrote the best tunes?” Elsewhere, Lord Skidelsky’s article on reinventing globalisation—the cover story for the new edition—has already been trailed by Madeline Bunting in the Guardian on Monday, and been spotted in Canada’s National Post.
We’ve ventured onto the airwaves over the last month too, especially with David Goodhart and Toby Young debating social mobility on Radio 4’s Today Program. Toby’s meritocracy essay was picked up by The New Zealand Herald. Confirming Prospect’s antipodean reach, Tim Butcher was also invited to appear on Australian ABC radio, to talk about China’s role in the turmoil in the eastern Congo and his recent Prospect article, “The Curse of Leopold.” Meanwhile, in what approached a clean sweep of the Anglosphere, Thomas Wright’s recent piece on Europe and America was run in the Toronto Star.
And that is quite enough self promotion for one day; until, that is, we start putting up the new edition, later this afternoon.
James Crabtree
Prospect’s own head honcho David Goodhart was on Radio 4’s Today this morning, along with our contributor Toby Young. Both of them deal with social mobility in the latest edition. Indeed, David used his biog descripton to come out as an old Etonian “who failed his A-levels first time round, went to a provincial university and married a grammar school girl.” The gist of the discussion is a shorter version of the arguments in the two articles. Toby argues that celebrity culture creates the appearance of social mobility that doesn’t really exist; posh, becks, and the rest make us think we can rise, when we can’t. David takes on those who say mobility has fallen a lot, and instead argues its probably only fallen a little, if at all. Eton also gets a mention. Listen to it here.
James Crabtree
I'm upper class. I'm more mobile than him.
British social mobility, so the received wisdom goes, is falling through the floor. A combination of conservatives, seeking to bash the Government, and the Government, seeking to justify further investments in social-mobility boosting public services, have agreed that Britain is now less mobile than it used to be.
One paper has been especially influential, the Sutton Trust’s work from economist’s Jo Blanden, Stephen Machin and Paul Gregg, who used British cohort studies to find a decline in upward mobility between the cohort born in 1958 and that born in 1970. Their 2005 paper has, arguably, had more influence on public debate than any academic paper of the past 20 years. So, mobility is falling? Not so fast, argues Prospect’s own David Goodhart. He finds problems with the findings, their use by politicians, and in particular different methods used by economists and sociologist. The result:
The lazy consensus which has decreed the end of social mobility is both wrong and damaging—implying that despite the billions that Labour, in particular, has poured into pre-school support and so on, nothing will ever change.
As a companion piece to David, we are also luck enough to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy with a wry essay from his son, Toby Young, on the rise of the celebritariat – “the people featured in Heat magazine, rather than Hello!, the premier league footballers and their wives, pop stars, movie stars, soap stars and the like.” Toby thinks this celebrity class is surprisingly meritocratic, and because of its visibility, it helps to persuade people that Britain is a fairer place than it really is.
Read David’s essay here, and Toby’s here.
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