by Owen Jones
In a meritocracy, those who possess the most 'talent' will rise naturally to the top. Social hierarchy will therefore be arranged according to 'merit'. Society would remain unequal, but those inequalities would reflect differences of ability. Matthew Taylor understands the dangers, but believes this is the best cause on offer. 'I think that meritocracy is not a bad rallying call because we're so far away from it, you know what Imean? To have a genuine meritocracy we'd have to abolish inherited wealth, we'd have to abolish private schools ... So when people say to me: "Well, meritocracy, isn't that kind of a reactionary concept and shouldn't we argue for more than that?", I can say: "Well, yeah, fine, but we're so far away from even having that." of course, New Labour never had any intention of abolishing inherited wealth or private education. Itargued for 'meritocracy' within a society rigged in favour of the middle class. Meritocracy ends up becoming a rubber stamp for existing inequalities, re-branding them as deserved. When I interviewed Simon Heffer, the right-wing Telegraph columnist, he argued: 'Ithink we are still largely a meritocracy, despite the destruction of the grammar schools, and I think class is a state of mind in that sense.' Meritocracy can end up being used to argue that those at the top are there because they deserve to be, while those at the bottom are simply not talented enough and likewise deserve their place. It is used in education to belittle vocational subjects in favour of the academic. All this before even examining the criteria for what counts as 'merit': for example, does a multi-millionaire advertising consultant deserve to be above a hospital cleaner in the pecking order of things?
The natural companion of meritocracy is 'social mobility', which New Labour put at the heart of its 2010 general election campaign. A few years before, Alan Milburn, one of Tony Blair's closest allies, had spoken of Labour's crusade to ensure 'that more people get the opportunity to join the middle class'. Rather than improve the conditions of the working class as a whole, social mobility is offered as a means of creaming off a minority of working-class individuals and parachuting them into the middle class. Itunderlines the notion that being working class is something to get away from.
It does not mean abolishing or even eroding classes, but just making it easier for individuals to move between them. It would not have any impact on the conditions of the majority of working-class people. Social mobility can mean offering an escape route from poverty, rather than attempting to abolish poverty. Sociologist John Goldthorpe disputes the consensus that there has been a decline in social mobility but, in any case, regards it as a red herring: 'The reason why there's been all this emphasis on social mobility is that all the political parties prefer to talk about social mobility and equality of opportunity rather than equality of conditions.'
Surprisingly, Blairite Hazel Blears is equally criticaL 'I've never really understood the term "social mobility" because that implies you want to get out of somewhere and go somewhere else because you're mobile! And Ithink that there is a great deal to be said for making who you are something to be proud of. And if you're working class, not to wear that as a kind of chip on your shoulder, or even a burden that you carry around with you, but actually something that is of value, for its about who you are, what your values own sake, that says something are, where you come from.' If the officially sanctioned route to improving your lot in life is to become middle class, what about the people left behind? Clearly not everyone can become a middle-class professional or a business person: the majority of people still have to do the working-class jobs in offices and shops that society needs to keep ticking. By putting the emphasis on escaping these jobs rather than improving their conditions, we end up disqualifying those who remain in them. We frown upon the supermar- ket checkout staff, the deaners, the factory workers--slackers who failed to climb the ladder offered by social mobility.
Another way that New Labour skirted the issue of inequality was by following in Thatcher's footsteps and pretending that class no longer existed. At the end of the 1990s, the government appointed a committeeto revisit the official social classifications used for national statistics-- then known as 'Social Class based on Occupation'. John Goldthorpe was delighted that it would be based on his own research, but was intrigued to discover that it had been renamed the 'National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification'. When he asked a member of the com- mittee, he was told that New Labour had vetoed any reference to class. It illustrated New Labour's dogged determination to scrub class from the country's vocabulary.
Hazel Blears traces the disavowal of class to Labour's experience in the 1980s and early 1990s when, she says, the party 'had been identified with quite an adversarial class politics'. In part, she believes this was because Labour's reputation had been tarred by the memory of once- mighty trade unions abusing their power. That, she claims, gave Thatcher legitimacy to say 'something must be done' to curb them. 'I think as a reaction to that, the Labour Party then both in economic terms and class terms was absolutely determined to prove its credentials, that it wasn't an extreme, adversarial party that was simply divisive.' In her own way, Blears has accepted that the retreat from class was the product of the repeated defeats suffered at the hands of Thatcherism triumphant. With 'class' no longer an option to describe inequality and disadvan- tage in society, New Labour invented new terms. 'Social exclusion' and the 'socially excluded' was the code for 'poverty' and 'the poor'. New Labour launched a Social Exclusion Unit after it first came to power. It even had a minister for social exclusion. The term strips away the more unpleasant connotations of poverty, like poor housing, low pay and so on. In essence it was a less pejorative way of saying 'underclass', with the same implications of a group of people who have been cut off from society. It was the New Labour take on the chav phenomenon: a dys- functional, excluded group at the bottom, and then the happy rest of us.
'You never knew how these people were being defined,' says John Goldthorpe, 'or what numbers you could put on it, what proportion they were. But then you said, "What exactly are they socially excluded from?" And you were told, "The mainstream of British society." But that's ridiculous! In a society that's as stratified and unequal as ours, there is no mainstream ... Again, it was this New Labour thing, they wanted to do something about the very bottom, and then pretend that apart from that, there wasn't a problem. But that's wrong! ... As I see it, the socially excluded is largely made up of people who are the most dis- advantaged within the working class.'
'Exclusion' did not have to mean being excluded by society-but rather being excluded by your own actions. When I asked Matthew Taylor whether one of the legacies of Thatcherism was that politicians now regarded social problems as the result of individual behaviour, he thought it was complex but, overall, felt that was the case.
There has been a general view which i&--and it is in the move from 'class' to 'exclusion' as conceptions-i-that exclusion is something which kind of suggests that 'Iam excluding myself, that there is a process, that my own behaviour is replicated in my social status. Class is something which is given to me. Exclusion is something which happens to me and in which I am somehow an agent. And so I think, yeah, absolutely, there was a sense not that you should blame the poor for being poor, although there was a bit of that as well, but that poverty was a process in which people were active in one way or another ... not simply the result of great impersonal social forces.
As one of Tony Blair's most senior advisors, and a very perceptive and astute political commentator, Matthew Taylor's honest inside look at some of the philosophies that shaped New Labour is revealing. Rather than simply being the result of social forces, your place in society was partly determined by your behaviour.
Jon Cruddas is in no doubt that politicians of all colours have a vested interest in denying the existence of class. It has proved an effective way of avoiding having to address working-class concerns in favour of a small, privileged layer of the middle classes. 'They devise ever more scientific methods of camping out on a very small slice of the electorate ... those who are constitut
ed as marginal voters in marginal seats.' Working-class voters were taken for granted as the 'core vote' who had nowhere else to go, allowing New Labour politicians to tailor their policies to privileged voters.
No New Labour politician personified this attitude more than Tony Blair. Matthew Taylor offers an interesting insight into Blair's political approach. '1 worked for Tony Blair, and the point about Tony is that Tony would always say when 1 would say to him, or other people would say to him: "What about a bit more kind of leftism in all of this? What about a bit more about poverty and justice and blah blah blah? ... '" Blair's response was blunt, to say the least:
Tony would always say: 'Fine, hut I don't need to worry about that, because that's what everybody else in the Labour Party wants, and that's what everybody else in the Cabinet wants, and that's what Gordon [Brown] wants, and that's kind of fine. And I'll leave them to do that, because I know that's how they'll spend all their time. They don't want to do public service reform, they don't want to do wealth creation, they're not interested in any of that, they'll just kind of hammer away at that agenda. My job is to appeal to the great mass of people on issues that the Labour Party generally speaking is just not interested in.
The near-obsession with ignoring working-class voters meant inflating the importance of a very small tranche of wealthy voters who were misleadingly construed as Middle England. After all, an individual in the very middle of the nation's income scale only earns around £21,000. 'You're probably right that we did misportray Middle England,' admits Matthew Taylor, 'but that again, I'm afraid, is not just a Labour characteristic. It's characteristic of the middle classes as a whole.'
This distortion sometimes reached absurd levels. Stephen Byers is a former New Labour Cabinet minister and one of Blair's closest allies. In 2006 he floated the idea of abolishing inheritance tax in order to win back 'Middle England' , despite the fact that only the wealthiest families in Britain were liable to pay it.
'There's a particular strand of uber-Blairism which basically is kind of just fucking mad,' says Matthew Taylor, 'and I'm afraid Stephenwho I like personally, Ihaven't seen him for years-he, I'm afraid, was probably more guilty than anybody else of occasionally floating these kind of mad Blairite ideas.' New Labour never did adopt Byers's grovellingly pro-wealthy inheritance tax proposal. Nonetheless, his thinking represented a deeply influential strain of Blairism that sidelined working-class people in favour of the concerns of a tiny but gilded section of the population.
It is not just the fetishizing of the demands of the wealthy and powerful that has rendered the working multiculturalism in an era when class invisible. The promotion of the concept of class was being abandoned meant that inequality became almost exclusively understood through the prism of race and ethnic identity. Dr Gillian Evans, a leading anthropologist and expert on social class, argues that while 'the struggle for class equality was said to have either been squashed or won, depending on your perspective', the battle for racial equality continued through multiculturalism. 'This saw black and Asian people struggling for greater ethnic and cultural respect and this has been, relatively speaking, a fantastic resistance movement that is to be celebrated.'
But because multiculturalism became the only recognized platform in the struggle for equality, Dr Evans argues that, on the one hand, we fail to acknowledge 'the existence of a multi-racial working class', and on the other, the white working class is 'forced tothink of themselves as a new ethnic group with their own distinctive culture'. Most dangerously of all, middle-class people have ended up 'refusing to acknowledge anything about white working class as legitimately cultural, which leads toa composite loss of respect on all fronts: economic, political and social.'
Weare rightly encouraged to embrace and celebrate ethnic minority identity, not least as a counterweight to continued entrenched racism. But a racialized 'white' working class is not seen as having a place in this classless multiculturalism. There are, after all, no prominent, respected champions for the working class in the way that there are for many minority groups. The interests of working-class ethnic minority people end up being ignored too, because the focus is on building up the ethnic minority middle class by ensuring diversity within the leading professions.
Yet, as New Labour lurched from crisis to crisis under Gordon Brown, it became increasingly difficult simply to pretend the working class did not exist. The racist BNP was growing in working-class communities in, for example, East London and North-West England. But New Labour politicians took the rising working-class backlash against immigration at face value, instead of examining underlying causes such as lack of affordable housing or secure, well-paid jobs. Rather than focusing on the economic ills shared by the working class of all creeds and colours, New Labour redefined them as cultural problems affecting the white working class. The white working class became one marginalized ethnic minority among others.
For example, back in 2009 New Labour launched a £12 million project specifically designed to help white working-class communities. Of course it is true that there are many working -class-i-and yes, largely white--communities that have been neglected or even abandoned by New Labour, and are in urgent need of help. But this approach takes us further down the road of linking the problems of working-class communities to their ethnic identity, rather than to their class. More dangerously, it encourages the idea that working-class people belong- ing to different ethnic groups are in competition with each other for attention and resources.
The thoughtless comments by New Labour minister Margaret Hodge in 2007 epitomized this view. Her cack-handed response to the rise of the BNP in her constituency was to complain that migrant families were being given priority for homes over people with a 'legitimate sense of entitlement'. Instead of demanding her government do some- thing about its shoddy record on social housing, she made the interests of white working-class people and of immigrants seem pitted against each other.
'White working-class people living on estates sometimes just don't feel anyone is listening or speaking up for them,' was how Hazel Blears put it in 2009, when she was New Lablur's communities secretary. Blears was absolutely correct: millions of white working-class people did feel unrepresented and voiceless. But for Blears, their concerns were almost entirely defined by immigration. 'whilst they might not be experiencing the direct impact of migration, their fear of it is acute ... Changes in communities can generate unease and uncertainty. ,
Only when the BNP was breathing down its neck did New Labour start talking about the working class again-and even then it was in a racialized form, and restricted to the immigration issue. Above all, it was an exception to New Labour's repudiation of working-class values, and its emphasis on everyone joining the middle class.
If you want to explode the myth that class is dead in modern Britain, and that anyone can rise to the top through their own efforts, the Palace of Westminster is a good place to start. MPs swan in and out of meet- ings with lobbyists and constituents, occasionally popping to the Chamber to speak or vote when called by the piercing division bell. Overwhelmingly from middle-class, professional backgrounds, the combined salary and expenses of the average backbencher comfortably puts them in the top 4 per cent of the population.
Scurrying around after them, or gossiping over lattes in Portcullis House, is an army of fresh-faced, ambitious parliamentary researchers. With unpaid internships (often, quite unlike their bosses, without even expenses provided) almost always a prerequisite for making it on to an MP's staff rolls, Parliament is a middle-class closed shop. Only those able to live off the financial generosity of their parents can get their foot in the door.
At the service of MPs and hacks alike are the cleaners and catering staff. Many of them trek across London on night buses to arrive in the House at the crack of dawn. Their wages place them easily in the bottom 10 per cent of the population. Until a fight for a living wage was successful in 2006, the cleaners of the 'Mother of All Parliaments' were subsisting on the minimum w
age in one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Watching middle-aged women trundling around trolleys containing the leftovers of roast chicken and chocolate gateaux, you can be forgiven for feeling as though you had walked into a Victorian aristocrat's manor.
It would be easy, but lazy, to portray Parliament as a microcosm of the British class system. It isn't, but it certainly showcases the gaping divides of modern society. When I interviewed James Purnell just before the May 2010 election that brought the Tories and their Lib Dem allies to 10 Downing Street, Iput to him how unrepresentative Parliament was: two-thirds ofMPs came from a professional background and were four times more likely to have attended a private school than the rest of the population. When I referred to the fact that only one in twenty MPs came from a blue-collar background, he was genuinely shocked. 'One in twenry?'
When I asked him if this had made it more difficult for politicians to understand the problems of working-class people, he could hardly disagree. 'Yes, indeed. I think it's become very much a closed shop ... ' For Purnell, this middle-class power grab was the result of a political system that has become closed to ordinary people.
In the build-up to the 2010 general election, a number of excited headlines claimed that trade unions were parachuting candidates into safe seats. 'Unions put their candidates in place to push Labour to the left,' bellowed The Times. And yet, in the end, only 3 per cent of new MPs were former trade union officials. There was no similar outrage about the number of prospective candidates with careers in the Citythe sector that, after all, was responsible for the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. One in ten new MPs had a background in financial services, twice as many as in the 1997 landslide that brought Labour to power. Politics has also increasingly been turned into a career rather than a service: a stunning one in five new MPs already worked in politics before taking the Parliamentary oath.
