Author Archives: clemattlee

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

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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.…

How politics lost touch with everyday life

How politics lost touch with everyday life

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Early on in his elegiac study of how our literary and aesthetic past might animate our political future, Marc Stears singles out DH Lawrence’s “wonderful essay” Insouciance, written in 1928, which he believes embodies “the vision that animates this book”. In the essay, Lawrence describes a meeting with two elderly ladies who try to draw him into a conversation about “Benito Mussolini and the potential threat he posed to the world” as he watches two men mow the lawn of the hotel where they are all staying. For Lawrence, “the worst ogress couldn’t have treated me more villainously. I don’t care about right and wrong, politics, fascism… There was a direct sensuous contact between me, the lake, mountains, cherry trees, mowers… All this was cut off by the fatal shears of the abstract word fascism… the little old lady… beheaded me, and flung my head into abstract space.”

It may be difficult for a modern reader to agree with Lawrence that he is the true representative of what he calls “actual living”. But both Lawrence and Stears are trying to make the larger point that it is in our daily life that the most significant experiences reside and that politics is too often unhelpfully broad-brush, arrogantly distant from the things that really matter. At the same time, we are alerted to the central problem of any study that ambitiously seeks to reclaim the values of everyday life. Whose everyday life? Whose values?

Stears is an academic, policymaker (currently director of the Sydney Policy Lab) and former speech writer for Ed Miliband, and it soon becomes clear that his ideas spring from cherished memories of a happy Welsh childhood. Celebrations of such familial and communal values, he argues, can be found in the writings of Lawrence, George Orwell, JB Priestley and Dylan Thomas (particularly in Thomas’s Under Milk Wood), as well as the images of the photographer Bill Brandt and the artist Barbara Jones. Taken together, Stears argues, their work represents a generous if unselfconscious social solidarity that sustained the best of Britishness through the interwar years and the Second World War, and found its apotheosis in the 1951 Festival of Britain: a guiding vision that could once again inspire our fractured nation.

Stears’s quest is interesting and bold, but his attempt to unearth a consistent theme across a medley of early 20th-century literary works and then to apply them to the pressing problems of 21st-century Britain soon becomes fraught – as he acknowledges – with contradictions.…

Melissa makes guest appearance on Thelma & Tom Look Left…

Melissa makes guest appearance on Thelma & Tom Look Left…

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Listen to Thelma & Tom Look Left – episode Five, with Melissa Benn, in which is discussed all manner of subjects and people – including Clement Attlee, Frank Ocean, Marvin Gaye, Keir Starmer…… oh, and why the left so often get wooden under media scrutiny.

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Rachel Holmes: Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

Rachel Holmes: Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel

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Click here to watch Melissa Benn’s interview, recorded in London last autumn, with biographer and campaigner Rachel Holmes about her new book Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. The discussion was filmed as part of the 2020 winter Cambridge Literary Festival programme.

 

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Mass Covid testing in England’s schools

Mass Covid testing in England’s schools

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Mass Covid testing at the drop of a hat is the latest bad idea for England’s schools

After the exams fiasco, a plan to turn schools into test centres shows politicians have still not learned to listen to teachers

Schools returning in January must provide for mass testing of pupils. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Mon 21 Dec 2020 13.56 GMT

It is hard to believe just how badly the government is handling the schools element of this Covid-induced crisis. Last week’s decision to threaten Greenwich council with legal action over its attempts to curb galloping infection rates looked heavy-handed from the start. Given that those same alarming numbers were acknowledged by the prime minister in his announcement on Saturday of the cancellation of Christmas relaxation plans, such threats now appear both absurd and rankly hypocritical.

Yet even this misjudgment is overshadowed by the chaos threatened by the government’s latest wacky idea: schools returning in early January must provide for the mass testing of pupils, turning themselves into the equivalent of a field hospital. Even the most politic of school leaders have called this announcement “shockingly chaotic”, “last-minute” and “a new low”.

While Scotland has sensibly delayed pupils’ physical return to schools by two weeks, here in England heads and governors must supposedly spend their Christmas break sorting out staggered starting times from early January, erecting or otherwise creating special testing centres and coordinating the staff to administer the tests (a medical not an educational task), with only vague offers of “reimbursement costs” and the involvement of the army.

Few need reminding that this is not the first such fiasco of the past nine months. The disaster over last summer’s exams, when the government was adamant that it would rely on official algorithms to predict results, until forced by public outrage to back down, remains deeply etched on the public mind. Yet it looks as if we are heading for similar problems next summer as the government is, once again, stubbornly sticking to its line that there will be exams-as-usual, albeit with minor concessions over timings and course content. In a pattern now becoming typical of the Johnson government, most nervously expect a late U-turn, and more chaos like we saw in August. Only this time, it could have been entirely preventable, with the introduction of moderated assessment in many, if not all, subjects.

Talking to teachers, heads and union leaders, I hear rising fury and despair at recent government actions and policies, many of them unworkable, un-costed and pushed out at the very last minute.…

Podcast appearance

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Podcast appearance

Melissa appears in the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast: YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD: a lifelong learning revolution.

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Women on the verge: Melissa Benn on Beatrix Campbell and Laurie Penny

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Prepare to be depressed. We are living through the “end of equality”, the once-celebrated advances of feminism going into dangerous reverse.

End of Equality Beatrix Campbell Seagull Books, 134pp, £6.50

Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution Laurie Penny Bloomsbury, 288pp, £12.99

Beatrix Campbell, journalist and activist, working-class radical and feminist, now in her later sixties, is in many ways the quintessential British writer. She has brilliantly reimagined Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, turned a tough and tender eye on Tory women, dissected Britain’s dangerous places and Diana, Princess of Wales, and, more recently, investigated the Northern Ireland peace settlement through the eyes of women and “the coalition of the committed”.

That she is not defined, let alone deified, as the quintessential British writer may be, at least in part, due to her being a working-class radical, feminist and activist – and now in her later sixties. . . Radical men (unless they are patently ridiculous) mature; their reputations settle and expand. Uncompromising feminists are too often faded – note the passive verb – into the background.

There’s a definite sense of kickback in End of Equality, her latest book. At 92 pages with nearly half as many again in footnotes, this slim volume packs a concentrated punch. It turns out that a potentially boundless mass of information from around the globe works best in pocket-size form, particularly when allied to a clear message.

Prepare to be depressed. We are living through the “end of equality”, the once-celebrated advances of feminism going into dangerous reverse. In the UK the pay gap now seems permanent, the multiple blows of austerity have hit women far harder than men, and men’s involvement in engaged fatherhood, though greater than it was, has not brought about the domestic democracy once dreamt of by second-wave feminism. Over the past four decades, men’s core domestic work has “increased by a rate of about one minute per day per year . . . a pace of change both palpable and pitiful”.

In the UK, decades of legal and campaigning work on equal pay for work of equal value, one of the most imaginative political strategies of class-imbued feminism, has led to some historic successes in Birmingham, Cumbria and Scotland, but cash-strapped local councils are unable or unwilling to pay up. Central government is not going to underwrite local councils as it did the banks, and certainly not in order to pay thousands of dinner ladies, carers and nursery nurses backdated settlements worth billions.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

Posted on

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

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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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Melissa Benn