A Question of Privilege. Reflections after a visit to a North London Sixth Form College

I spent a large part of Thursday travelling to and from, and speaking at, a selective state school.  It is a ‘Sixth Form College', a type of school which is of course allowed to select on ability at 16 , though it is against the law to do so at 11, when the life-chances of the young are already hardening and becoming fixed. As it happens it is on the site of a former grammar school.

 

We were in the outer territories of North London, where the Underground isn’t in fact underground and the suburban roads sprawl in every direction, the sort of place where the upward curve of demand meets the downward curve of supply and most of us end up with the scruffy lawn and the stunted trees and the vista of other people’s back gardens, still dreaming of the Wisteria-hung Old Rectory, or the moated Jacobean manor-house surrounded by ancient beeches and cedars.

 

We’d given the talk the provocative title of ‘Why I hate the 60s’, but I think the 60 or 70-odd people who came were mostly there to glimpse (and perhaps tweak the tail of) the fabulous monster known as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’. I’m reliably informed that various persons had boasted that they were going to throw rubbish at me (none did ) or that they were going to ‘rinse’ me (I’m told this workaday word currently means ‘triumph in argument over’) . If any did, I didn't observe it. 

 

One pupil, or rather ‘student’ at the school had already Tweeted in protest at my planned appearance. Another later gave me a backhanded compliment, first calling me a rude name and then complimenting me for braving the ‘most liberal school in North London’.

 

It went reasonably well. A quick poll at the beginning revealed a large number of ‘Guardian’ readers and no readers of the ‘Daily Mail’ (I decided not to ask about their Sunday reading habits). I explained the reasons for disapproving of the 60s, and – to forestall the usual false claims that I am a nostalgist - offered a 100-rouble banknote as a prize (unclaimed) for anyone who could show that I had at any stage described the 1950s as a ‘golden age’. I more or less reprised the chapter in my ‘Abolition of Britain’, in which I imagine a young woman of the late 1990s being transported back to the urban England of 1965, and all the changes she would note.

 

The passage baffled a lot of reviewers who were convinced the book was nostalgic and couldn’t square this with my evocation of grime, incessant smoking, horrible food, traffic fumes and chilblains.

 

I think I probably also baffled a lot of my audience, especially when I said I very much approved of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which ended the stupid persecution of homosexuals.

 

What I noticed (or thought I noticed)  in our exchanges about divorce, sex-education, abortion, the death penalty etc. was an almost total incomprehension of the moral and political concepts which underlie my position. While I know perfectly well that school sixth-formers think what they do about these things, and why they think them, they were more shocked by the fact that I dared to say these things than by the ideas themselves, which they immediately placed on the shelf marked ‘archaic’.

 

If there were any more conservative pupils present, they didn’t make themselves obvious.

 

I said to one questioner (most of the questions seemed to be about my view of divorce, interestingly, and many seemed based on the bizarre assumption that violent abuse of women only takes place within marriage)  that of course my moral positions were archaic. But that didn’t make them wrong.

 

After the meeting was officially over, a dozen or so people stayed behind to carry on questioning me (in the end , the room was needed for something else and we had to be chivvied out of it by a teacher, if that is what teachers are called in such places). At one stage I was upbraided for being privileged. I countered by asking in what way I was privileged.

 

This wasn’t a rejection of the suggestion in itself. I’m well aware of my good fortune in life.  I just genuinely wanted to know what the person meant, and what assumptions she had about me. Rather than answering, my questioner flounced away, pretending to be amused,  as if the answer were too obvious to be worth discussing.

 

But then again, am I any more privileged than my questioner - who attends one of the best state schools in the country and so is practically guaranteed entry to a good university if she works hard enough?   

 

I had what I regarded (and still regard) as a happy, safe and comfortable childhood. I never went cold or hungry, nor was I neglected in any way.  But privileged?  By what standard? My father was the son of a council-school teacher (who eventually became a headmaster) and the grandson of a dockyard labourer. Naval Commanders were never especially well-paid, and retired naval officers even less so.  We spent much of my childhood moving from one rented house to another.  Our most ambitious family holiday was a week in the Channel Islands. Mostly we went to the Isle of Wight, or the Sussex or Cornish coasts. My private schooling, which ended when I sabotaged my own education at the age of 15, wasn’t especially distinguished by the standards of the time. I doubt that my parents (who had foregone much to pay my brother’s school fees) could have afforded it had I not won a scholarship.  Though I now recognise that some of my teachers were extraordinarily good, I do not think that such teachers were particularly rare in the state schools of the time.

 

I suspect that I would have done as well academically, if not better , had I gone to a state grammar school (I passed the 11+). I would probably have stayed at school, too.

 

I got to University from a College of Further Education, working on my own for the final year of ‘A’ levels. In my teens I did what were then the normal temporary jobs that most of us did to raise some extra money, from lifting potatoes to mucking out pigs to rolling barrels and slinging crates in a brewery.  I did get a maintenance grant, but lived within my means for those three years. I did my indentured apprenticeship on a provincial newspaper, living off small wages, and moved to another provincial paper for a small increase.  During all that time I met all my own needs from my own pay, and stayed solvent. When I got my first Fleet Street job in 1977 I thought I was rich on an annual salary of £5,500, which is something in the region of £35,000 in today’s money. And so I was. In those days, before the house-price lunacy was in full cry,  you could still live reasonably cheaply not far from the heart of London, a pleasure today’s young will never know.

 

I had been working at my trade for more than 20 years (including two stints as a foreign correspondent) before I became a columnist. I don’t deny or decry my great good fortune, but I do think I worked for quite a bit of it. I can’t really be said to have inherited it. And there are plenty of people in my rather democratic trade who have done as well and better without any boarding-school or university education.  There’d be more of the grammar schools hadn’t been abolished.

 

Obviously, and who should know this better than I, who have been in the shanty-towns of Caracas,  the slums of Bombay, the longtangs of Shanghai, the desperate industrial cities of the USSR and the townships of Africa, any person from a  rich western country is hugely privileged compared with them. But that’s just a statement of the obvious.

 

I’m not sure my life could be described as especially ‘privileged’ in terms of English hierarchies.  And if mine can be so described, then so can the lives of those to whom I spoke yesterday.