A personal spat between two men who attended the same school, friends since university, both members of the restaurant-trashing Bullingdon Club: that is what has become of the debate over Britain’s EU membership. It doesn’t stop at the Boris Johnson-David Cameron psychodrama, of course. Stanley Johnson, the London mayor’s father and a former Conservative MEP, takes to the airwaves to defend his son from allegations of careerism. And his brother, the Conservative minister Jo, deletes a retweet of their other brother, the broadcaster Leo, ridiculing Boris’s stance.
Dizzy? As the latest Sutton Trust study into the backgrounds of Britain’s elites underlines, we shouldn’t be surprised. It underlines the findings of repeated studies: that from politics to the media (yes, this newspaper included) to high court judges to film and theatre, the privately educated – 7% of the population – reign supreme.
More than seven in 10 of Britain’s top military brass had parents with the means to send them to private schools; the proportion is even higher with top judges. The world of journalism is dominated by gilded backgrounds: according to the study, over half of the top journalists are privately educated, with just 19% having attended a comprehensive. As for politics: well, half the cabinet went to fee-paying schools very few of their electors could hope to attend. Further, over two-thirds of all Oscar-winning Brits are privately educated; and while that figure drops to 42% among Bafta winners, it still remains completely out of sync with the population as a whole. Unless you believe that being privileged and being gifted are the same thing, then nobody can look at these figures as a fair distribution of talent and ability.
This is important. Over the last generation – and longer – there has been a shift in attitudes towards inequality. We’ve been encouraged to believe that those at the top deserve to be there, through their graft, determination and intelligence; and that, equally, those at the bottom are there because they are lazy and feckless. It is a convenient rationalisation of profound inequality perpetuated by a persistently negative media portrayal of those in poverty and a belief that what we once considered social problems are actually individual failings. But the truth is, the upper tiers of British society discriminate on the basis of wealth, not talent.
For those who dominate Britain’s elites, this is an unwelcome discussion that normally provokes a defensive reaction. Who doesn’t want to believe they have risen to success because of their own innate ability, talent or drive? To believe there are potentially more talented journalists, politicians, actors and judges from Manchester’s terrace houses and Glasgow’s housing schemes: well, it’s a recipe for insecurity. Better to comfort yourself with the belief that inequality is really just deserts.
When I’ve raised these issues in the company of privately educated individuals thriving in their chosen fields, the response has been as though they were being personally insulted. But inequality is nothing personal: it is not the fault of individuals, but the system in which we live. I may not be privately educated, but I recognise that I wasn’t one of the only boys in my primary school class to attend university because of raw talent, but because of advantages conferred by my middle-class, public-sector background.
It’s not just unfair – there are consequences for all of us. We all look at the world through a prism shaped by our experiences: of our parents, our schools, our friends, and our colleagues and associates. That doesn’t make it impossible to understand the lives of people with different backgrounds, but it certainly makes it more challenging – particularly if you are surrounded by others with similar upbringings.
Perhaps issues such as the housing crisis and work insecurity would be more salient if more politicians were personally affected by them. Nye Bevan may have languished near the bottom of his class at school, but witnessing hardship undoubtedly fuelled his determination to establish the NHS.
Similarly, if more journalists didn’t hail from, say, private schools and pampered southern upbringings, the media might capture more accurately the needs and wants of a larger swath of Britain’s population; and lawyers might not struggle to understand the lives of clients from backgrounds entirely divorced from their own.
How to explain such grotesque inequality? The evidence suggests, after all, that state school students get significantly better university degrees than their privately educated counterparts with the same A-levels. Studies in previous years by the OECD suggest that, once you take into account socioeconomic background, there isn’t much of a performance difference between state and private schools. In other words, those from privileged backgrounds tend to do as well at state schools as they do at private schools.
The reasons differ. Take acting, a very insecure profession marked by long periods of unemployment. London is a honeypot for actors, and one of the most expensive cities on Earth. If your parents can afford private school, they are more likely to have the funds to sustain your precarious career. In the media, unpaid internships are rampant. As the Sutton Trust notes, employers often value applicants who have done this unpaid labour. But how many can afford to work for free in London?
There’s no question either that private schools strive to give their students a certain confidence – often interpreted by others as arrogance – that is valued by some employers. Networks also often prove important. Both Cameron and Johnson owe their early careers to family contacts. As the Sutton Trust says, we like to stick to our own: when employers meet those who sound and act similarly, they may instinctively prefer such people over someone who seems culturally removed.
International studies suggest children from poorer backgrounds weigh less, and the children of affluent parents are exposed to a broader vocabulary from day one. Growing up in an overcrowded house can indeed damage a child’s education too.
Inequality runs through our society like a stick of rock. The elites are not better than everybody else – they’re just luckier, given helping hands while others are met with slammed doors. It is a waste of talent. And we all suffer for it.