A fascinating, yet thoroughly depressing, article in today’s Guardian, decrying how a “rigged system (prevents) working-class talent thriving in their industries after analysis showed almost a third of major arts leaders were educated privately.” The Guardian survey “revealed a disproportionate number of leadership roles were occupied by people who were educated privately and those who went to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.” Who’d have thought it? Well, me for starters.
Perhaps things might change now that we have the most working class government in the history of Britain. Yes, I know that prime minister Keir Starmer was a successful lawyer and that chancellor Rachel Reeves was an economist, so neither are probably struggling to feed the electric meter on a cold morning, but what is perhaps more important is where they came from: the working class. Just like me, he said; in my case, a balanced personality with a chip on each shoulder.
I have no doubt that class still counts for a lot in Britain. Many of the top positions in society, in business, in academia, perhaps more understandably, are filled with the upper orders. Two of our most recent prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, were both old Etonians and ex Oxford university. Even England’s elite cricket and rugby union teams are stuffed with privately educated posh boys. Privilege runs deep in Britain today. Well done to the Guardian. Up the workers and all that. Except …
As you can imagine, the left leaning Guardian is very much against elite privilege. That’s why the editor Katharine Viner was educated at an elite private school and went on study at Oxford University, before working her way up the newspaper ranks to the top job. And just to prove her meritocratic credentials, she gave her boyfriend, now husband, broadcaster Adrian Chiles a column in the paper, where we learn useful things like he has a urinal in his apartment. However, everyone else, well they’re like us, right? Hmm, maybe not.
Hard left commentators Andy Beckett, Aditya Chakrabortty and, inevitably, Owen Jones are all Oxbridge chaps. So are Jonathan Freedland, Simon Jenkins, Marina Hyde, George Monbiot, Zoe Williams, Emma Brockes, Larry Elliott, Timothy Garton-Ash, Polly Toynbee – even the brilliant sports writer Barney Ronay, all Oxbridge, mainly Oxford. Such a diverse collection of writers. And they are just the names I looked at. God knows how many other journalists at the Guardian went to the top universities. I haven’t even looked at The Observer hacks yet, although soon they won’t be part of the same stable anymore.
You get my drift, though. The Guardian rightly points out what is a national scandal and you scratch below the surface and you find that the same kind of people dominate the main jobs there, too. By the way, in case you think The Guardian is an exception in employing so many people from elite backgrounds and universities, the rest of Fleet Street is much the same and scandal sheets like the Sun are packed to the gunnels with privately educated staff. Perhaps, the arts should do a job on the national newspapers in general or the Guardian in particular.
To be fair, more working class children do get the chance to go to university these days, despite the best efforts of the 2010 Conservative government, in which the Lib Dems took jobs and took the opportunity to triple university tuition fees instead of abolishing them, as they promised to do. I’ve never forgiven the Libs Dems for that. Nothing like encouraging the lower orders into further education by saddling them with enormous debt, is there?
The rich have continued to get richer, particularly under Thatcher and then under Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and then Sunak, and the opportunities for working class kids are still as limited as ever and, actually, this matters, unless you think it’s perfectly all right that millions of people are unable to fulfil their potential. And given that there is no purpose to life beyond procreation, why should we have so many haves and have nots?
The Guardian has actually served a useful purpose in highlighting how class still divides this country, by way of its journalism – this is a good story – and its own hypocrisy. The glass ceiling is still there and is being fiercely protected by the establishment and I include the Guardian in that. As we so often say, some people are more equal than others.
Of course, children who go to private schools generally have better outcomes in their post university lives. That’s why their rich parents send them to private schools and naturally the top universities attract disproportionate number of privately educated pupils in their ranks. That is what the class system is for. And it is why, unless you are married to, say, a newspaper editor, your chances of getting a writing gig, if you are from the lower orders, are not good.
Our whole system in Britain, at every level in everything, is rigged. And the truth is that working class people do not get the opportunities handed out to the better off. Of course, working class people do succeed, not least because they have to work twice as hard as their more elite students and workers and they often have to be better at what they do.
With so many people railing against diversity and equality, following Donald Trump’s grotesque lead in America, it’s entirely possible that those who really need a leg up, the less well-off, women, older people, the sick and disabled and yes those of colour will become more disadvantaged than they are already. When some halfwit wangs on about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), as they call it in the USA, they are really saying they oppose everyone having the same chance to succeed, of being treated equally, of not being discriminated against for whatever reason. In these days where
