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February 24 - February 25, 2019
1958, it was intended as a warning.
Young’s fictional essay The Rise of the Meritocracy had imagined a Britain of the future in which a meritocratic elite had replaced the old aristocratic order.
The supposed cranial superiority of the new elite was used by the new order to justify the gulf between it and wider society.
As for the supposed self-made men who sat atop this new meritocratic pile, all rich men in the new society had earned their fortune and were thus permitted to enjoy the extravagant rewards as they saw fit.
‘a satire meant to be a warning
IQ + Effort = Merit
‘It hasn’t been taken as a warning but a sort of blessing,’ he told an interviewer in 1994.4
For most of Britain’s history, young people have grown up with a keen sense of their station in life.
Things only really began to change (and even then very slowly) with the passage of the 1870 Education Act,
However, the new law was not introduced as an act of generosity; rather, it was thought that by fully exploiting the talents of the many rather than the few Britain would better be able to compete with its emerging economic rivals.
‘giving education to the working classes would be bad for their morals and happiness. It would lead them to despise their lot in life instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other work to which their rank in society had destined them …’9
Even among those seeking reform, educating the poor was typically framed in terms of how it would benefit capitalists, rather than how it might improve the lot of workers.
In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, champion of the free market and author of the influential The Wealth of Nations, argued along similar lines in favour of educating the poor. For proponents of the free market, nepotism and Britain’s rigid social order were impediments to an efficient economy.
The problem for free marketeers wasn’t so much inequity as inefficiency.
However talented they might be, nepotism discouraged those placed lower in society from ever attempting anything that smacked of aspiration.
Under Thatcher, you were not despised if you scrambled up from the very bottom; rather, you were assumed to be useless if you did not.
Yet there is something disconcerting about the way a concept conceived of as having potentially dystopian consequences has been adopted by politicians as a sacred goal.
‘Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy’.
or, as Labour politicians prefer to call it, ‘equality of opportunity’.
Twenty-first-century social democracy will defend to the death your right to be unequal to the next man – as long as merit, rather than wealth, has placed you on your allotted rung of the ladder.
Related to this was Labour’s conversion to the principle of ‘equality of opportunity’ over equality of outcome.
‘Some radicals … would be content with the strictly limited objective of equal opportunity
the party was intent on raising the working class as a whole, rather than simply plucking the most meritorious from its ranks. Opportunity was seen as a collective right rather than an individual one, and was wedded to the socialist ideal of a classless society.
Yet it was the birth of New Labour that finally cemented the goal of a meritocratic society as, on the surface at least, a cross-party aspiration.
‘by equality we meant more than a meritocratic society of equal opportunities, in which the greatest rewards would go to those with the most fortunate genetic endowment and family background
New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes’.
For New Labour, taxing the rich heavily would have been punitive and counterproductive.
A loosely regulated City would drive growth, which would in turn push up tax revenues that could be spent on the poor.
This represented the politics of the so-called third way, a blend of right-wing economics and left-wing social policies.
Anthony Giddens,
Making social democracy more business-friendly was a central tenet of third-way thought.
Beyond New Labour, social democrats abroad were also attracted by the politics of the third way after suffering numerous political defeats at the hands of a resurgent conservatism in the 1980s.
As a consequence of its adherence to the third way, in government New Labour shied away from policies associated with reducing the gap between rich and poor, such as higher taxes on top earners.
New Labour politicians often had a vested interest in maintaining educational inequalities.
As a consequence, economic inequalities unleashed by eighteen years of Conservative rule were aggravated.
This was not simply the fruit of a booming economy, but the result of deliberate spending decisions taken by successive New Labour governments.
New Labour stressed equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. This ideological metamorphosis was born of both electoral expediency and the need to update Labour’s guiding philosophy for the twenty-first century.
Broader historical trends also played a part in Labour’s ideological transmutation. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a blow was struck not only against the totalitarian delusions of communists, but also against the faint hopes of some on the left that economic planning could be made to work if only the right people were put in charge.
In contrast, as the 1960s became the 1970s, it was impossible not to notice the flaws in the centre-left status quo. Nationalised industries had become inefficient behemoths that were heavily reliant on government subsidies.
This, along with grim electoral reality, made the pursuit of economic equality a political dead end
the Tories were still seen by many as the party of the old aristocratic elite.
Both Labour and the Conservatives were promising social mobility; yet it was New Labour who seemed to really mean it.
‘the Britain of the elite is over. The new Britain is a meritocracy.’
‘The meritocracy is built on the potential of the many, not the few’
It was no longer important how much money those at the top made. What mattered instead was giving those at the bottom a leg up so that they too could enjoy the glittering prizes on offer in Labour’s socially mobile meritocracy.
Politics today is supposedly dominated by the progeny of the country’s most prestigious fee-paying schools.
there was a higher level of social mobility after the Second World War; and the way to reverse this trend is to improve things like education for poorer pupils.
‘in every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power … are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class’.
structural mobility.
The structure of the economy changes and as a consequence there is more room at the top.
