The fall of the meritocracy

Andrew Neil

29 January 2011

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Politicians from ordinary backgrounds have become an endangered species

Consider the social pedigree of the leading lights on both front benches today. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne went to private schools whose fees are more than the average annual wage. More than a third of the current Commons was privately educated, three percentage points up on that elected in 2005, reversing a downward trend over several generations.

Twenty went to the same private school (Eton, naturally), of whom eight are in government. That’s right: eight ministers went to the same school. Maybe that’s why a conversation in Downing Street last year about school sports budgets ended up with a discussion about who had played what position in the Eton wall game.

Labour is nowhere near so posh. But the horny-handed sons of toil are no longer in favour; nowadays it pays to be middle-class and to go straight into politics after Oxbridge. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went to Oxford from affluent north London, graduated in philosophy, politics and economics — or PPE, an apprenticeship scheme for budding pols — and was soon working for Gordon Brown. The defeated David Miliband went to the same Oxford college (Corpus Christi), also did PPE and was soon advising Tony Blair.

The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, is another Oxford man, who also graduated in — yes— PPE and also ended up working for Brown. At Oxford he met his future wife (and current shadow home secretary) Yvette Cooper, which should not be a surprise, because she too was reading PPE.

Let’s recap here. In supposedly modern, meritocratic 21st-century Britain, the Prime Minister, Deputy PM, Leader of the Opposition, the Chancellor and the shadow chancellor all went to Oxbridge, three of the five did the same degree and all were privately educated bar Miliband. Oxford is particularly well represented: it’s the alma mater for four of the five. More men from a single college — Magdalen — sit around the Cabinet table than women of any background. It would be hard to argue that today’s political leaders aren’t bright or well educated. They are. ‘Nice but dim’ public schoolboys don’t make it to the top in politics any more. The concern is that the pipeline to the top has once again become too narrow, making politicians unrepresentative of the kind of people we are.

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Ben WELLS

January 28th, 2011 11:46pm Report this comment

A single phrase in this article strikes at the heart of the problem: "poverty of ambition": ambition is the fuel of progress, both individual and collective, and the lack of this is crippling our society.

Almost all of the ambition that one sees in the educational system today is parental ambition. All parents want the best for their children, but the well-educated, well-connected and well-off are far better equipped to provide it. They are much more likely to be able to manoeuvre their offspring into the best schools, or pay for them if all else fails; they can persuade their friends & contacts to offer interesting work - experience and stump up for confidence & charcter - building extra-curricular activities. Those children lucky enough to receive this parental bounty will go on to dominate admission to the best universities and professions, but only a few of them will have the necessary combination of ability and personal ambition to actually repay their parents' efforts on their behalf. I recall that about 7 years ago, this very magazine published an article by an Oxford graduate from the late 1970's, lamenting how little his generation had achieved: one of them had become a General, and that was about it.

The exraordinary value of grammar schools was that they gave a route for ambitious children, regardless of their background or their parents' capacity to help them, to reach the top: in the mid-1960's, there were significantly more state-educated students at Oxbridge than privately-educated ones. The fact that most grammars were dominated by a bulk of dull, pampered, cossetted middle class children with ambitious parents, even then, is largely irrelevant- these were the padding that smoothed the route to the top of those who could really make a difference, regardless of class.

The purpose of education should be to allow all of our children to fulfill their potential: the comprehensive system is fundamentally flawed in that it maximises the value of attainment and minimises the value of ability. Ambition, which defines the difference betweem ability & attainment, is treated as a dirty word, with the result that everyone except universities and employers treats a Grade A A-Level in Maths as equal to a Grade A A-Level in Media Studies.

I myself teach in a special school; it is clear to me how valuable a tool ambition can be in managing & developing the aspirations even of children at the most troubled end of education; and my own children are at a grammar school, where many of the children are ferociously ambitious, regardless of their parents.

Selection in education causes almost as many difficulties as it solves; but in that gap between pros & cons, selection recognises the ambition of the children themselves, and thatis what makes it invaluable.

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