I want my rulers chosen on merit, but care more about how they rule
|
Version 0 of 1. Surprise, surprise, Britain is ruled by an elite of like-minded people from the same middle-class backgrounds. According to the commission on social mobility and child poverty, this should be a “wake-up call”. Something must be done urgently “or nothing will change”. Merit is outgunned by class. Elite recruitment must be “background blind”. These bromides are so old I rather think they are put out by the establishment to anaesthetise revolution. The commission, composed of classic quangocrats and led by a Labour ex-minister, Alan Milburn, does not relate what progress, if any, has been achieved by past wake-up calls. We do not know what has worked and what has not. Most countries are run largely by the products of middle-class education. I doubt if Britain is any worse in this respect. The commission’s figures are startling, with a quarter to three quarters of the courts, the cabinet, the BBC and others coming from Oxbridge and/or independent schools. On the other hand, the survey covers leaders rather than total staff or recruits, which is surely the “social background” issue. Apparently 54% of my profession of journalism went to independent schools. I wonder at the sample size. Britain has the liveliest, most competitive media in Europe. I cannot recognise Milburn’s charge of collective “group think” among the Guardian and the Daily Mail. The media are further pluralised by the digital revolution. I am sure a similar competition is affecting recruitment to finance, the law and accountancy. As for the idea that the class system is holding back British aviation or agriculture or tourism, that is absurd. I sense Milburn has chosen his samples to suit his case. Nor is it clear what the commission wants done about this. Parents may agree that all children should be treated equally, yet theirs perhaps more equally than others. Suggestions for reform are modest, from a bizarre corporate audit of staff backgrounds to “university-blind” application forms. As for moving away from recruitment based on exam grades, it was Milburn’s government of manic quantifiers that made a religion of grades – a boon to selective academies, pushy parents and private tutors. The commission nowhere proves that power in Britain is worse for the educational bias of its leadership. But then it avoids the greatest non-governmental centre of power, the City of London, whose social elitism was smashed by Thatcher in the 1980s, with dubious results. If Milburn and his colleagues had the courage of their convictions, they could simply ban Oxbridge or private-school products from specific posts, taking their cue from women-only shortlists and the old Yorkshire County Cricket Club. This is not the point. Milburn’s merit regime may be commendable, but it is not the answer to the evils of British elitism. In 1958 the sociologist Michael Young in his Rise of the Meritocracy predicted a widening of higher education would mean that “irrespective of people’s birth, status would gradually become more achievable”. But there was a danger. While it was “good sense to appoint individuals to jobs on their merit, it was the opposite when those who are judged to have merit … harden into a new social class without room in it for others”. Merit was one thing, meritocrats quite another. Many years later in 2001, Young protested that Tony Blair’s support for meritocracy missed his ironic point. Merely channelling brighter recruits into a closed power structure would increase its sense of moral superiority and tendency to autocracy. It would leave an ever more embittered underclass of educational rejects, who would eventually rise in revolt. Young satirically predicted this revolt for 2033. Like Young I want my rulers chosen on merit, but care more for how they rule. It is the distribution of power that matters, rather than its make-up. In 2000, the Norwegian state celebrated the new century by getting a team of academics to look forward over the next 100 years. The prediction was a shock, an evolution from open democracy to closed oligarchy. Norway would be run by an Oslo stage army of coalition politicians, officials, bankers and the media. The oligarchs would mop up talent, drawing it from the periphery and concentrating a meritocracy at the centre. Norway should fragment and disperse the institutions of central power out of Oslo to the provinces, or a dispossessed underclass would grow ever more restive. It was Young’s satire repeated as forecast. I am sure much of the reason for Britain’s apparent exclusivity lies in the concentration of power in London, in the so-called villages of Westminster and Whitehall. This centralism is relentless and arrogant. This week alone it oozed from the manner of the no campaign’s contempt for Scotland’s wish for self-government. It oozed from the manner in which Rotherham’s clearly inadequate childcare officials – no Oxbridge accents there – faced the savage scorn of the London media. It oozed from the London arts establishment demanding to be excused from the austerity cuts falling on others. America is often cited as having a more open politics than Britain. The key lies in its federalism, in its continent-wide dispersal of power. Governors and mayors, judges and businessmen, academics and intellectuals do not feel they must migrate to Washington to fulfil their ambitions. America may often seem on the brink of implosion, yet it draws strength from its fragmentation of power, the same fragmentation as was advocated for Norway. Referring to all evils as “starting with the education system” is the oldest of cliches. It is a cop-out. We could say the same of elites. They will always recruit in their own image, hence the current row over an Australian clerk for the House of Commons. But their composition is not their essence. What matters is their potency over others. As the nature of work changes and careers fracture and fragment, the nature of access to elite jobs will change. It is right to stem the abuse of interns, reform apprenticeship and end labour-restrictive practices. This will hardly dent the great British establishment. That requires a constitutional revolution, to scatter power, move it out of London, away from the centralism of parliament, the civil service and the media. I bet there will be no elite commission on that. |