Why must politicians seek to legitimise themselves through tales of early hardship overcome by ambition and hard work? The recent Tory leadership election has provided an unexpected illustration. We have had some admittedly impressive backstories. Sajid Javid came from a family on the margins, with a father who worked his way up from a Rochdale cotton mill and driving buses to owning a shop in Bristol. His family’s ethos of hard work inspired Javid to become a millionaire banker. Rishi Sunak’s grandmother arrived in the UK with nothing, his mother studied hard to become a pharmacist, and his hardworking parents financed his education at Winchester College, thereby giving him the life chances he says he would like to see all children enjoy. Liz Truss, for her part, claims to have been educated in a supposedly gruesome comprehensive where the pupils spent more time learning about racism and sexism than how to read and write, yet still managed to win a place at Oxford. She would like to see all children have the education that will enable them to flourish. Jeremy Hunt, a self-made millionaire, has previously described his “daily grind to stay alive” as a young entrepreneur and the same pitch would undoubtedly have been dusted off had he lasted longer in the race.
One reads these stories of (nearly) self-made icons in awe at their achievements. In some cases, the awe is tempered by a touch of scepticism, like that expressed by fellow students from Truss’s old school, who have written warmly of excellent teachers whose encouragement enabled them to thrive. In other cases, it may be moderated by sour observations about the way wealth, once attained, tends to beget yet more wealth, in a manner unavailable to those relying on modest salaries. But what exactly is going on here?
It’s not in itself unusual for successful individuals to credit their own hard work and perseverance for their achievements in life and, by implication, to suggest that anyone equally hardworking could have done the same. Samuel Smiles was extolling his successes in this vein in his widely read Self-Help in 1859. Nor is it unusual—though this is more a phenomenon of the 20th than the 19th century—for politicians to make themselves out to be more ordinary and down to earth than they really are. Harold Wilson smoked a pipe in public though in private he is said to have much preferred cigars. He also said he preferred tinned salmon to the real thing, though I now suspect this too was shaped for public effect. But claiming a bit more ordinariness than you are entitled to is a long way from attributing your successes to hard work, and there is something particularly disturbing about the current tendency to represent oneself (or, when this is just too implausible, at least one’s family) as battling against the odds to succeed. That so many politicians now feel obliged to talk in this way, including even the wealthiest of Tory politicians, tells us a lot about the currently impoverished public discourse around issues of equality.
First, it reinforces the contrast between “good” families and “bad” families that has become too much a feature of contemporary political life. One welcomes, of course, the recognition that parents matter, but every time a politician invokes a family ethos of hard work, or addresses an imagined audience of “hardworking families,” this implicitly directs attention to the “not-so-hardworking.” The listener immediately understands what this signifies: those aimless youths drifting along the streets with neither qualifications nor a steady job; those fantasists dreaming of easy wealth but never putting in the effort; but also, by extension, the millions of people who depend on the UK’s depleted welfare system for their subsistence. In a different context and within a different framework, references to hard work might have been understood as signalling a contrast with the rentiers, whose inherited wealth has enabled them to live a life of no work at all. Or it could be meant as a reminder that those who work the hardest often get the poorest rewards, and that we live in an unfair society. Yet more typically, in contemporary discourse, hard work is presented as enough to propel oneself into the stratosphere. The implication, inevitably, is that those not so successful just didn’t have the right kind of family ethos. They didn’t learn about the importance of effort.
It’s not unusual for successful individuals to credit their own hard work and perseverance for their achievements
These tales of early hardship overcome by commitment and hard work also ignore two central problems with the equality of opportunity that is being gestured towards in these accounts. First, that the scale of the changes necessary to provide us all with the same chances in life are such that they dwarf current policy recommendations; second, that so long as the opportunities opened up by our efforts remain as they are, there is no way that everyone can achieve the same level of success.
We tend to think of equality of opportunity as the more manageable, less radical, alternative to equality of outcome, for while everyone can surely sign up to people having the same chances in life, few of us would think it necessary for everyone to end up with the same level of resources. Yet consider how much would have to change before we could honestly claim that people had the same opportunities. Removing all forms of discrimination is clearly one priority, and we have legislation to achieve this. But where people work and how much they earn still correlate significantly with gender and race, and though discrimination is not the only explanation for this, elements of conscious or unconscious bias still affect recruitment and promotion. Equalising children’s educational experience is another obvious priority, but again, think of what serious implementation of this t’s not in itself unusual for successful individuals to credit their own hard work and perseverance for their achievements mean. A national rollout of new early years’ support on the model of Sure Start; enough teachers trained, and schools built to reduce class sizes in all schools to the levels currently enjoyed in many fee-paying ones; enough resources to ensure that all children at school are well fed, and all have access to the necessary books and IT equipment. Educational experts can no doubt add much to this list, but even what I have noted here confirms how very far short we currently fall of providing equality of opportunity.
In an imagined world, moreover, in which opportunities were indeed equalised, the second problem would cut in. So long as some positions are more coveted than others, either because the nature of the work is more appealing or because it is rewarded with the crazy multiples of average earnings that currently characterise our economies, there are going to be more equally qualified candidates than coveted openings. That world of improved opportunities for a wider range of people will then leave many without what they have been encouraged to expect as the rewards. We see this already in the significantly reduced “graduate premium” that has accompanied the expansion of higher education. A 2019 study confirms what most of us have already intuited: that while graduates born in 1970 earnt on average 19 per cent more than non-graduates by the age of 26, for those born in 1990, that advantage has dropped to 11 per cent. And when too many with the same qualification are chasing an unchanged number of coveted jobs, something else will ultimately tip the balance: perhaps an assumption that the men among them will work harder than the women (or indeed vice versa); perhaps a continuing conscious or unconscious preference for those perceived as being of “one’s own kind”; perhaps a family connection, or just some quirk of personality. We are then right back into the inequality of opportunity.
None of this is to say that our governments should not be working as hard as possible to equalise opportunities, including by focusing public resources more effectively on the poorest neighbourhoods rather than—as too often happens—on the richer. (Amazingly, research on the first allocations of the government’s “levelling-up” fund showed that some of the wealthier councils were being allocated as much as 10 times more than the poorest.) But in pursuing an equalisation as regards access to opportunities, we should not lose sight of the extraordinary inequality that remains as regards the possible destinations. In the UK (following at some distance the even more unequal US), the rewards attached to being the CEO of a major company have careered upwards since the 1970s, partly through enhanced salaries and pensions, but mostly through the growing use of performance-related bonuses and stock options that allow them to buy company shares for a reduced price. In 2020, the median reward of CEOs of the FTSE 100 companies was £2.69m, 86 times that of the median full-time worker; and bear in mind that the median full-time wage is itself beyond the dreams of millions in the UK. One might add here (though I realise this is a less popular point) the extraordinary wealth now enjoyed by some of the most successful practitioners of the creative arts. With musicians and artists and novelists we more readily tolerate the wealth because we appreciate the talent and work, but here too there is a kind of craziness about what the most successful can now earn. The differences in talent or effort hardly seem large enough to justify the earnings gap with the median creative artist.
In pursuing an equalisation as regards access to opportunities, we should not lose sight of the extraordinary inequality that remains as regards the possible destinations
A focus on life chances or opportunities too often serves to divert attention from the large and growing inequalities in the outcomes available once we have seized our opportunities, and the impossibility of all of us, however hard working, being able to achieve the highest rewards. It also, of course, diverts attention from those who simply cannot get into this kind of race, whether because of illness, care responsibilities for children or parents, or the myriad other ways in which lives do not follow the “opportunity” route. Pious wishes for giving everyone the same kind of chances as one has oneself enjoyed are unrealistic and profoundly misleading, substituting image for policy in a manner that has become far too characteristic of recent politics. In failing to generate any of the policies that might be necessary to realise that supposed promise, they are also dishonest.
We do, for sure, need political representatives who know from their own lives and those of their larger family what it is like to live with illness, or addiction, or the threat of unemployment, or the daily harassments of racism or homophobia. One of the weaknesses of our current parliament is that it is not sufficiently representative of “ordinary” citizens, veering rather more to the extraordinary side—as indeed is illustrated, despite the tales, by the initial line-up of candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party. Experience of hardship and poverty, but also of normality, matters in politics, and this experience can still drive people to seek elected office. The test then is whether they continue to recognise that the same struggles will continue (in recent years they have intensified) for many around them, and that dealing with the challenges of life takes a lot more than individual hard work. One TUC report estimates that 3.7m people in Britain—one in nine of the workforce—are in insecure employment: in low-paid self-employment, doing agency work, in casual and seasonal employment, or on zero-hours contracts. The numbers are likely to go up and no doubt are already doing so. These people are often incredibly hard working, having to accept long shifts and unsocial hours, and sometimes combining more than one job to enable them to make ends meet. Without better support from the state in the form of stronger workers’ rights, their hard work isn’t doing the trick.
