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… .
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