The real non-existence of the classless society, and how it has ruined government policy

I read today that 1,701 people applied for 8 job posts at a branch of Costa Coffee in Nottingham. If you do the maths, that's around 213 people, on average, applying for one post, meaning that 212 people per post will be rejected. Isn't that pathetic and depressing? But what amplifies this is that it is likely that the majority of those wishing to get hired will have degrees, of all shapes and colours, from all institutions. For me, the fact that there is such a variety of degrees shows the disaster created by a flawed policy to get 50% of school leavers into university. And, in times like these, we are seeing the aftermath.

You see, this target seems to be a successor to this universal new world Utopian dogma, so flawed in 2013, that ‘everybody will be middle-class’, and that Britain will be stripped of its strict class system to become a country of equal consumers in this new ‘classless society’. It started with the abolition of grammar schools, then by allowing people to buy their council houses, then the abolition of rigorous O-Levels and the introduction of suspiciously easier GCSEs, and then we put forward the notion that everyone and anyone should go to any university and for whatever career.

I think we should have seen this coming with the introduction of tuition fees, which showed that the State would realistically be unable to fully subsidise such great places of learning. But now, the problems go far deeper. It is now deeply ingrained in our heads that attending a university is a must, an obligation, and that to not do so would be a failure. This is nothing to do with our information age and the collapse of traditional industries in the United Kingdom, but the exploitation of the aspiration of working-class families and the subsequent rut that we, as a society, have dug ourselves.

And I bring your attention back to the fact that these people are working-class. Some say that we may be richer than our forefathers, and yes, perhaps the waters have become muddied (I would say mainly due to post-war-consensus-style social mobility), but class goes deeply beyond that. Class is a set of values, a culture, a lifestyle if you will. Wayne Rooney and the countless other mugs who find themselves kicking a ball for millions a year will be, in my eyes, working-class on account of their vulgar, white Range Rovers and their regional accents (because, Ladies and Gentlemen, the RP accent will always be the sign of those higher up the social ladder). Whereas the landed gentry who are short on money but big on land, and who still drive 1980s estates, will always be upper-class, as they will prefer Twickenham and Lord’s to Wembley, and who are a third of their way through the library of books.

The point is that this, our legendary social strata, won’t change, and this must be accepted by Government policymakers. The first step to solving the social problems, both of deprivation on sink estates and of the snobbery from above, is to accept a class society. Indeed, it is better than having a society purely based on race, like in the United States and in other EU countries (go watch this relevant HIGNFY clip with Reginald D Hunter). And such an admission is nothing new. The Attlee Cabinet, a group of men whom we ought to venerate at least five times a day, recognised this with their fight against Want, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance and Squalor, the five evils of any society. And although the United Kingdom of 1945 differs heavily from UK 2013, these triumphs remain to be effected, but only through tailoring policies that help each subsection of this country.

This necessity in governing a multi-layered country was ignored most notably by New Labour. I don’t so much demonise but sympathise with Tony Blair, a Christian who believed that the Labour Party fitted his beliefs (I can hear you cynics at the back there!). He obviously wanted to improve the lives of those devastated by the economic overturn of the 1980s. But the failure to aim his schemes at one particular section of society made him vulnerable, especially by making it abundantly clear that anyone, right-wing or left-wing, could give him his vote, not least because Major was weak. The effect of this ideology is seen best in SureStart, a scheme that was supposed to give parents a place not only to look after their children but to gain parenting advice and support. No wonder it was mostly used by middle-class mothers – after all, it was free. Coupled with increases in state benefits, it was as if the Government at the time were busy placing wallpaper over a damp that had been spreading through the foundations of society since the deindustrialisation of the North, as if a quick catchup would be all that was needed to provide a single, level class, and that money would in turn purge the working-class of their respective inhibitions.

The current government, with ‘heir to Blair’ himself, David Cameron, at the helm, is regurgitating this ridiculous dogma. This time, it’s in the form of demonization, under the opinion that people on benefits just aren’t working hard enough, that they are scroungers and shirkers, whilst completely ignoring the drop in standards of education, whilst ignoring the saturation of university degrees in the job market.

And then there is society itself. Sadly, Thatcher was wrong when she said that there is no thing such thing as society. It’s just that it forms when it doesn’t wish to take the blame (a bit like ‘solidarity’). But we collectively are at fault. We look up to doctors, lawyers, and anyone who could be described as a ‘desk jockey’, whilst we look down at tradesmen, whilst blithely ignoring that plumbers can earn just as much as lawyers, especially when reputations can be earned. This is snobbery, and we all do it. But this competition with the Joneses has spiralled out of control from the good old days of Cortinas and rosebushes. And now we are paying the price.

My solution is this: an admission of a class-based society. Through this we can tackle unemployment by providing vocational support for those who are most suitable, whilst providing academic education for those at the other, to provide real social mobility in terms of both wealth and status. But most importantly, everyone needs a change of attitude, and that our snobbery has led to this. Aspiration is brilliant, but everyone has aspired so much, that the sky, our limit, has become out of reach for many thanks to the pushing and shoving of a horde moving in one direction.

Only when the economy recovers will we then see the effects of recession

Am I exaggerating when I say that the world is, in fact, in revolution, or am I just gullible in a world of endless media coverage? I don’t think anyone can deny, however, that the 2010s seem to have started with a bang – the West in financial turmoil, the Arabs in political turmoil, and both have seen people on the streets, accompanied with heavily varied levels of violence, to say ‘Down with the status quo’, although one doubts whether a new order is ready to take over, or even existent. Indeed, this makes the United Kingdom, a grey, grumbling, uppity group of countries full of likewise people, seem rather tranquil, despite a sudden flair of disorder in the hot summer of 2011, perhaps so tranquil that they thought London was tranquil enough. The proof for this is in the sticky, rich plum pudding that is the British economy, not embedded within a sixpence, but various dollar bills, euros, roubles, and Yuan. As the rich tycoons flock from angry mobs encamping themselves in town squares, from the feuds of oligarchs, or from full-blown all-or-nothing civil war, this country seems attractive, looking in all directions of the globe, luring those whose earnings make up for their hearts as blue as the way they prefer their steak.

But disorder is not permanent, and when I say not permanent I mean that it will cease for a long enough period of time to allow money to be made again. They will resist the strong magnetic pull, perhaps because they realised how bad the weather is. And in a globalised world, where the freezing of bank accounts is like using a mousetrap to catch bears, the money will follow. The moons of money rotate around those human planets which rotate around the great sun of stability. And when the great world recovery picks up, what will remain? Will the designer shops manage to keep customers in London, as they may do in Moscow and Shanghai?

The more pressing issue is property. It is only with such low interest rates, the lowest ever in the history of the Bank of England, that people have managed to remain in their houses, and perhaps that is more of the case in London, where prices are more than double the average, and where £500,000 is not a figure that renders surprise. Why are they so high, even when the UK’s economy was, and currently still is, in the doldrums? Not only is London a safe haven, but the big elephant in the room is speculation, as London was alike with the rest of the country in spending coffee mornings and office chat about figures for property, and in the obsession of Location Location Location, for a country with relatively poor infrastructure makes London look like a jewel.

But those two factors are under threat by those interest rates, at 0.5%. It is only a certainty that interest rates will have to rise beyond the current level. With the new governor, Mark Carney, about to step into the shoes of the Bank of England, we can also only see an end to the catastrophe of quantative easing, of the printing of money. And what happens when lots of people can’t pay their mortgage at the same time? The answer is a property slump, where millions are wiped off the property market in London. Indeed, this is not new. Paris, during the Great Depression, went through a similar cycle, as 1929 saw ever higher property prices, before there was a great slump, as a result of the revival of the American economy in the mid-1930s.  And this is not all bad – the best advice for young earners who want their place on the property ladder is simply ‘If you can, keep saving for that deposit’, and wait for the boughs to break on a heavily-inflated market.

In no way do I condone the death of hundreds of innocent people across the world. Nor do I give my backing to far-right movements springing up in Greece, or Islamist movements in Tunisia and Egypt, but the fact of the matter is, despite the meddling done by the current government, Britain’s economy has been ticking along, but only just. The influx of foreign tycoons from unrest is simply the vapours from the fuel tank of the British economy. As a result, Britain must act slowly and steadily like the tortoise, until the petrol pump that is investment and global prosperity is on the horizon. 

The Elite: Why there is no point or sensible justification in getting rid of it.

How hard do you think it is to imagine this image? There is a Victorian town house in a reputable London district like Notting Hill, Islington. You walk through the front door, and sitting on black leather tables, sat around an oak table eating Marks and Spencer ready meals and sipping on Chateauneuf du Pape, is a Prime Minister, a journalist and a famous chief executive from a particular zeitgeist in the last fifty years. No, I don’t think it’s hard to envisage either, and I would go as far to say that I would be surprised if such meetings didn’t happen between the powerful. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the elite, a group of well-connected, well-known busybodies who have influence. Yes, these are people who will have say in the policy of government, over what will be written in newspapers or reported on television. The revolutionaries will cry in battle ‘Off with their heads, people power is the future!’ but they will say so in vain, and here is why.

England was, like so many societies around the world, feudal – the control was, in this case, in the lands of around eleven major landholders, including the Church and the Crown. However, the rise in the bureaucracy and the slow trickle of men ‘on the make’ saw the balance in the power slowly change as we went from primogeniture in noble families to an emphasis on working through the ranks of the institutions, whether through the army or through the other institutions that laid the bedrock for imperial ambitions. And through this, we have seen the balance shift first from the royalty, then the landed gentry, specifically through Magna Carta, then the upper middle-classes who owned companies and liquid assets. The task remains, thus, to allow more of those from lower down to gain the place at the high table.

The key has lied, and will always lie, in education, where the slipping standards over many years and the one-size-fits-all attitudes across all political spectrum for varying ‘principles’, whether it be the wish to keep the workers docile, the instant dislike of spending money to improve people’s intellect, or the flawed doctrine of equality which falls consistently into the trap of Orwell’s quote, that ‘some are more equal than others’. Selective education, free and to suit every profession and ability, has consistently provided results, as seen in Germany with the ‘Gymnasium’ education, and although the Tripartite System in the 1950s was corrupted by the lack of funds, to abandon it completely was a terrible idea.

That is not to say that Britain has completely failed in education. Indeed, impressive results of our universities besides Oxford and Cambridge, most prominently in London and in Bristol, show a horizontal trend in providing opportunities to all those on the class scale, as bright working class children living in the inner cities are not forced to move into expensive halls to receive an enriching experience at university.  

But there are the revolutionaries who dye their hair red and wear flat caps who shout for a demolition of the ‘old order’, who call for the capitulation of the entire class system. My response is similar to my response to religion: humans are not superhuman, and the framework of humanity remains similar all over the world, with social hierarchy as the core. It makes no difference whether there is a democracy or not, or whether there is a republic or not. France serves an example. Contrary to its cry for the republican values of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, executives take no shame in the exclusion of the immigrant population from society, where children in the cités often receive inferior education, and where their CVs are thrown immediately in the bin. All the while, the life of Jean-Yves Leclerc (replace with equally extremely French name), is quite the opposite. Having attended a prestigious lycée and one of the grandes écoles, he lands a comfortable graduate job. In the United States, there is a group of elites, in Russia and the Soviet Union there is and was an elite class, only the nature of those in charge shifted from the traditional Communist bureaucrats to the oligarchies, comparable to that of the Roman Empire. The only way you open up opportunities to those of working-class backgrounds is to pull back the curtain, to allow those who are able, to participate. To demolish such groups and raze them to the ground is merely to force the cycle back to square one, not of society, where we are primates, but only of elitism itself, where the select few simply close the doors to outsiders, even more oblivious to the outside world than today.

Social mobility has always been a contentious issue, which goes back to the questions of, ‘Should the best and brightest minds be running the country, or should everyone have an equal say in the governance of a state?’ The answer to both of those questions seem to be ‘Yes’, despite their openly contradictory subject, and both point to the dismantlement of the elite. Yet there is a clear misunderstanding of the concept of society and social hierarchy. We may know of the historical documents which point to the social structure of the Romans or the Victorians, but we class ourselves in the present-day as ‘different’, just as the Victorians and the Romans did in their present day. But that table with the Prime Minister, the journalist and the executive in the house in a nice district of London could be the same in 1913 as today, and could be similar in nature in 1813, and 1713, and 1613, and… .