Monthly Archives: January 2010

Read all about it…

Below, three links to Melissa’s latest journalism:

* Opinion piece in this week’s Public Finance on why neither party can win the class war.

* An in depth interview in The Guardian today with Mary Foley, an extraordinary woman, who has forgiven her daughter’s killer.

* A review in this week’s New Statesman on Kate Figes’s latest book on modern coupledom.…

Divide and school

Read Melissa Benn’s latest post on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website on the emerging two tier exam system in our education system.…

Do the maths………..

Excellent article by Will Hutton also in today’s Observer about class and private education, the great taboo – yes, still – in public and political debate.

For the moment, I will simply refer to one statistic quoted by Hutton. Ten million people in this country earn £15000 a year or less, and there are a further three million who do not make themselves available for employment: who are, in other words, chronically unemployed. To which I add my own statistic: most private schools cost circa £15000 a year; some, incredibly, a great deal more than that.

A level playing field for all our children? You work it out!…

Go Ed!

I’m glad to see Ed Miliband, in his Observer article today, nail the lie that there remains a yawning gap between so called aspirational citizens and so called core Labour voters.

Miliband talks instead of self interest and shared interest, and the need for Labour to build on common values rather than make a lame last minute appeal to the presumed self interest of this or that demographic.

Miliband is right to frame the discussion in quite different terms from the Blairite years. We are all aspirational now, in that everyone desires access to good housing, a good education and reasonable standard of living. (The tricky part, of course, is that in this age of instant information, we are all more aware, in a superficial sense, of what those common goals might mean for others which makes equality an ever more complex goal.)

The problem with the old New Labour aspirational model was that it too often ended up sanctioning unacceptable forms of self interest. In terms of the national finances, it condoned excessive greed. In education, despite the best efforts of many, its policies confirmed the creation of a hierarchy of schools, with the panicked middle classes getting their pick from the higher echelons of the state pyramid. In housing, it meant a virtual silence on the need for affordable or social housing.

For whatever reason, Brown’s government feels very different to these early Blair years. It feels like there is a return to the ‘shared interest’ question at last: Labour’s natural territory.

Too little too late? I don’t know. But whatever the electoral outcome, it is clear we are entering a period of much needed renewal within the party. Miliband junior is, quite rightly, turning a possible crisis into a fresh opportunity. There is certainly a desperate need for a new conversation and for fresh ideas to promote social justice, and just as importantly, new respect for older traditions and models.

To that end, I am also glad to see Miliband praise the importance of collective action and talk of the need to create ‘ real jobs in engineering, not just financial engineering.’ Always good to see a politician turn the art of the sound bite to positive political use.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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