However they measure class, statisticians have found that the huge university expansion of the past twenty years has disproportionately benefited the children of the already well off. The gap between the higher-education participation rates of the working and middle classes is now wider than ever.
The effort that New Labour has put into increasing the chances of the poor—all Gordon Brown’s Sure Start schemes and measures to redistribute wealth—has merely slowed the march of inequality.*
There are few signs that it is slowing in the twenty-first century. I suppose it is possible that upper-middle-class parents working full time to maximise their income, and contracting out their childcare to east European nannies, will be handicapping the prospects of the next generation of rich kids. Babies raised by Bulgarians may not have the linguistic and cultural advantages of their parents. Even if that risk arises, I am sure that private tutors and private schools will fill the gaps in their early education.
The economic reasons for our sclerotic society are easy to grasp—money begets money. The rich pass on their wealth and its rewards to their children. The explosion of wealth at the top of society has left social mobility far more constricted in ‘classless’ Britain than in the more egalitarian economies of Germany, Canada and Scandinavia. The greatest myth of the free-market right is that its policies allow the poorest child to go from rags to riches. Healthy societies have few citizens in either rags or riches.
Economics alone cannot explain why the children of the poor are finding it ever more difficult to move on, however. As the saying goes, the right won the economic war and the left won the cultural war; and it is in the confusions of liberal-dominated cultural life that the second set of explanations for middle-class dominance can be found.
I have written as if it were obvious that social mobility was worth having, but in the twentieth century, the left was far from sure that it was. Michael Young in his Rise of the Meritocracy of 1958 put the case against. He was nervous about a future where the rich believed they had earned the right to be rich because of their inherent merits and the poor believed that their poverty was their own fault. Better to have an aristocracy that feels guilty about its luck in being born to wealth and power than a world where winners and losers believe they have received their just deserts. The poor would still be poor but they could find consolation in the thought that they were the victims of an unjust social order rather than their own failings.
Young’s ideas helped pushed Labour to abolish grammar schools. Many Tories took up the cause. They grasped that if you combine a comprehensive state system with a selective private system—as Britain and America do—you have the rich parents’ dream. If their children are bright, they go to a good private school. Competition for places is fierce, but the field is limited by the parents’ ability to pay. If their children are clots, their wealth can still be decisive because it allows them to move into the expensive catchment areas of the best comprehensives. Either way, money talks, and poor but talented children are confined to the worst schools. For all his erudition, Young was a fool not to realise that, in the name of equality, the wealthy could exploit the education system.
The unintended consequences of egalitarianism in education would not have mattered so much if they did not coincide with wider cultural changes that were profoundly hostile to the working class. At the end of his Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose asked why 200 years of self-improvement through libraries, lectures, schools and newspapers organised by and for the working class stopped in the sixties. His conclusion was that the supposedly egalitarian assault on the ‘dead white men’ of the classics served only to increase middle-class privilege. When there was agreement on the canon, when society accepted that, for example, you could not be educated without knowing Shakespeare, there was a clear path for the self-taught to follow if they wanted to catch up. Since the sixties, however, the canon has been careering around the deck. Cultural trends have had ‘as brief a shelf-life as stock-exchange trends, and they depreciate rapidly if one fails to catch the latest wave in architecture or literary theory,’ Rose noted. The eruptions of faddism—avant-garde, progressive, le dernier cri, new wave, modernist, postmodernist—‘reflect the Anxiety of Cool, the relentless struggle to get out in front and control the production of new cultural information’.
Each new wave carries fashionable ‘high’ culture farther away from the working class. Once, the middle-class left saw the workers as the very vanguard of history; now it dismisses them as sexist, racist and conservative. Rose searched a database of academic books published between 1991 and 2000. He got 13,820 hits for ‘women’, 4539 for ‘gender’, 1826 for ‘race’, 710 for ‘post-colonial’ and a piddling 136 for ‘working class’.
It should not be a surprise that the lower orders do not care about education, when the educated care so little for them.
New Statesman, March 2005
* And I mean all. In 2005 the Lake District National Park threatened to cancel its guided treks up the fells because too many ramblers were ‘middle-aged, middle-class and white’. ‘Ethnic minorities and people with disabilities’ were not willing (or able, I guess, in the case of the disabled) to take to the hills, and so the walks must stop.
* In 2008 a grateful government seized on a report that showed family background seemed to have become less significant in determining children’s GCSE performance, prompting a minister to claim there were ‘signs of good news’. Well, maybe. As the report’s authors said, the clutch of policies Labour introduced may have a lasting impact on social mobility for children born after 2000. But, ‘it is a bit premature to claim a big success’.
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