Tag Archives: Simon Jenkins

Is Britain still too elitist?

Below, my contribution to a recent discussion in Prospect, reflecting on the publication of a recent report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

The big question: Social mobility

Is Britain still too elitist?

A new report states that people educated at Oxbridge have created a “closed shop at the top”

Each week, Prospect asks a range of experts, as well as our readers, to come up with answers to the questions defining the political agenda.

This week, a report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission into the social makeup of Britain’s leaders in business, media, politics and public service found that elitism was still deeply embedded in British society. Alan Milburn, the Labour former cabinet minister who chairs the commission, concluded that Britain remains a “deeply divided” country.

Read more here including my contribution to this discussion ( reproduced below..) Other contributors include Simon Jenkins, Toby Young and Anthony Seldon.

‘Liberal’ attitudes mask a war on the poor

The findings of Milburn’s report are pretty unequivocal. Britain is still ruled largely by those who come from educationally privileged, and therefore affluent, backgrounds. Today’s elite combines covertness about privilege with an extraordinary carelessness about the lives of others—this is typified by leaders like Cameron and Clegg, who have prosecuted a ruthless war against the poor, cunningly masked by a modern “liberal” attitude. Among the most pressing reforms needed now is a genuinely fairer education system and more diverse political representation. I particularly like the idea of university-blind job applications.

Melissa Benn is a writer and campaigner and founder member of the Local Schools Network…

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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