Decline and Fall

On the plight of Great Britain's most oppressed minority.

Acid Workshop by Carl Larsson (1912)

Please spare a thought for Great Britain’s most persecuted minority—the privately educated seven percent. For time immemorial, this plucky band of scrimpers and savers have spared twice the average salary to send their sprogs to Harrow, Eton, and Westminster. For our collective benefit, the wealthy shoehorn their children into the social elite—saving us commoners the bother.

Apparently, their private altruism finds little appreciation amongst the ungrateful hordes. In the pages of sympathetic media, one reads their laments:

“Keir Starmer’s plans to rip away our tax breaks are mightily unfair. We work hard. What about our children Hugo and Binky? Without a private education, they’ll have to rely on their natural abilities. How will we purchase a grotesque advantage for our half-witted offspring? We’re supposed to be a meritocracy!”  

You cannot open a newspaper or magazine in Great Britain without encountering such piffle. Of course, the aggrieved authors of such letters aren’t so candid. They don’t couch their laments in defamiliarized Swiftian terms. But they might as well.

Private schools sell privilege. The schools know that. The children know that. The parents know that. I know that. You know that.

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The British middle-classes are losing their marbles. Save a nuclear winter or brain-eating syphilis pandemic, our next prime minister will strip private schools of their 20 percent tax break—costing them millions of pounds.

Keir Starmer’s ticklish little tinkering will force many middle-class parents to send little Cressida and little Barnaby to the same schools endured by the other 93 percent of British kids. Worse yet, schools will assess those private-school refugees on their innate talents and abilities and not on their parents’ ability to pay their way into the best schools and the best jobs.

Here, I describe a meritocracy. Is my definition awry? To the militants of privilege, meritocracy means something rather different. They own the field. They carefully select who can play on the field. They rig the scoreboard to reflect only the efforts of those permitted entry to the field. The playing field is, they insist, level.

I suppose if one has enjoyed centuries of baked-in privilege, even the tiniest tickle of the scales would feel like watching the hangman size up your weight and height as he adjusts his noose accordingly. After all, removing an obscene tax break isn’t quite ransacking Eton and shimmying a hammer and sickle up the flagpole.

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Keir Starmer’s proposal aligns Great Britain with those basket-case ‘socialist’ countries such as, erm, France, Germany, and Scandinavia.

In these backwards swamps, the average citizen is richer, healthier, more productive, more socially mobile, happier, and better educated than the average Brit. There, the poorest take two generations to reach the top. Poor British kids climb for a mere 150 years to reach the top of their meritocracy.

Those fetid backwaters enjoy a more consensual politics. I italicise consensual because British politics is about as consensual as a rag soaked in ether.

Much of British cultural life reminds me of Lord of the Flies. The private-schooled dominate academia, politics, the arts, the judiciary, the media, and sport. That seven percent occupy half of the top jobs in the land. Our political life is a spear-throwing skirmish of ancient high school tribes, seduced as teens by a Latin motto stitched on their school ties. To this grubby primitive theatre, the rest of us are slaves.

That’s not to disparage the privately educated. Blessed a spare fifteen to forty grand a year, all parents would buy such an advantage for their children. Yes, many of those educated at Eton, Harrow and the like are deservedly successful. Perhaps all my literary heroes fell out of Eton or Oxford. Neither am I minded in telling others what they can and cannot do.

But it does not follow that a democracy—let alone an alleged meritocracy—would encourage such engines of social disfigurement.

In civilised countries, success isn’t for auction to the highest bidder. Unless, of course, one believes the proto-eugenic fiction that private school kids are inherently superior. (They’re not. State school kids with identical grades do better at university than private school kids.)

To believe such patent bollocks is to believe the opposite—poor children of deprived families in deprived towns, who lack decent schools and job opportunities, are feckless and inept. Strangely, such woeful inadequates spawn in post-industrial towns pockmarked by mothballed factories and shuttered steelworks.

As Upton Sinclair put it, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And so too is it difficult to accept one’s successes are not always entirely one’s own. A privately educated man with the same degree from the same university as a working-class man will earn around 15 percent more over a lifetime. That’s the same intelligence, the same work ethic, and the same merit for a different result.

Defenders of such obscenity pooh-pooh any and all criticism. But such self and public deceptions dissolve outside of a test tube. If you’re not spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy an obscene social advantage, then what are you buying?

On a rickety stretcher, the champions of educational apartheid wheel out their maimed, pus-oozing arguments. The politics of envy! Not quite. Envy is not wanting what others have, but wanting to deprive them of something you don’t have, even to your detriment. Suggesting that a civilised society would minimise the malign influence of private schooling is not driven by envy or its misapplied relative—jealousy. ‘Excellent education for all’ is not the cry of the green-eyed nor the Utopian. Peerless French schools churn out thoughtful, liberally educated citizens no matter whether their parents wear blue overalls or pinstriped suits.

In The Telegraph, one writer claimed, in all seriousness, that life is unequal anyway. You see, some parents take more interest in their kids’ education. Some parents read to their children, and scoot them off to the Tate Modern etc. Children of stable homes where books line the shelves, do better at school. Should we ban books, too?! The writer in question is a satirist, so perhaps they’re not entirely serious.

But the dirty, used needles of such sordid arguments litter comment sections and pub carpets. Leaden with logical fallacies, such weak arguments could sink a cruise ship. Just because inequality exists in untouchable forms doesn’t mean it should exist unmolested in British schools. Yes, we all die anyway. That doesn’t mean we should legalise murder.

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So, what are those parents afraid of? Surely, meritocracy’s winners would welcome a level playing field in which little Cressida and Hugo can prove their success is entirely their own and that the losers deserve their lot?

Perhaps they fear the brutalist logic of meritocracy. If your successes are all your own, then so too are your failures. Without a guaranteed ticket to the top, such monstrous arithmetic doesn’t quite add up.

For the rest of us, this is good news. The spectre of fewer mediocrities armed with a dangerous sense of provenance and a delusional sense of competence is one this long maltreated nation can weather. We’ll be all right, mate.

I cannot speak for the majority. But I cannot be alone in my convictions. We’ll be better off without Hugo and Binky entitling themselves to power and influence simply because they fell out of their well-heeled father’s worn-out cock.

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