A Classless Society, by Alwyn W. Turner – review

The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised more excitement.

John Major sought the creation of a classless society in the 1990s. He confused this with equality of opportunity and social mobility. Efforts to engineer classlessness always end in tears. George Orwell was right: some animals are more equal than others — even in death. Orwell shares an Oxfordshire churchyard with Herbert Asquith.

It was an insipid decade when managerialism triumphed over leadership. Ideas and intellectual rigour were kept in check, and institutions were repeatedly assaulted. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this inertia may have been influenced by the American academic Francis Fukuyama, who claimed that the clash of ideologies was over. As the victor, liberal democracy represented the universal and final form of human government. There was no need for strong leaders any longer; step forward the managers.

Bill Clinton, instructed daily by focus groups, forsook global leadership for re-election. Warren Christopher, his first secretary of state, personified the clerk as manager. In Russia, communists were replaced by tsarists without the regalia. Helmut Kohl was a managerial mediator between factions and functionaries inside and outside Germany. Under pressure — as in the war — France, under François Mitterrand, found survival more agreeable than leadership.

In Britain Roy Hattersley was heckled at a 1996 meeting when he urged Labour MPs to stick to their principles on becoming ministers. ‘What’s wrong with managerialism?’, they cried. The following year, Tony Blair’s first cabinet contained only three people who had supervised more than the distribution of press releases. For managers, read spin doctors and ministers setting courses by the lights of every passing ship.

Spin was the scourge of the 1990s, and it remains so.