Ahead of Andrew Neil's documentary on social mobility tonight, Matt Gwilliam looks at the high number of public schooled politicians – including in the Shadow Cabinet.
Tonight, at 9:00 on BBC Two, Andrew Neil presents an eye-opening documentary, Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain, in which he “seeks to find out why politicians from all parties appear to be drawn from an ever smaller social pool – and why it matters to us all”; here, Matt Gwilliam looks at the high number of public schooled politicians – including in the Labour Shadow Cabinet
Last week saw the departure of Alan Johnson from front line politics. His departure is a great loss; he was a formidable politician and in addition, his personal background gave the Cabinet and more recently Shadow Cabinet real credibility with the wider public that increasingly sees politicians as having come from a distinct background.
Recently, the Fabians’ Sunder Katwala proposed a 20 per cent tax on private school tuition fees to fund a real pupil premium for state schools, a compelling and eloquent argument that reminds us that equality of education is at the very core of who Labour are as a party.
Few people would disagree that private education confers privileges and advantage to those who enjoy it, and that going to private school is almost exclusively linked to the accident of birth. However, many argue that private schools are what parents aspire to for their kids and penalising aspiration is not an option – but can the Labour party seize the initiative about schooling in a different way?
In the Shadow Cabinet elections there were calls to have quotas, guaranteeing a third or half of the shadow cabinet must be made up of women. Doing this would overcome any discrimination and force a change in culture. Similar arguments are used for all women shortlists (AWS), which appear to have been a great success at getting more women into parliament.
When it transpired that »40 per cent of the shadow team were women, some thought a quota still important to send the message that the party are serious and never complacent about equality. Perhaps even the debate about quotas before the shadow elections assisted in getting more women elected.
The government’s cabinet is less than 20% female. It is also 59% privately educated – eight-and-a-half times that of the general population (7% privately schooled), a huge overrepresentation. Should the Labour party be once again leading the way, by talking about a cap on the number of privately educated members of the Shadow Cabinet?
When this idea was floated to an MP who was a champion of AWS and positive discrimination for women, the reply came “where do you stop?”, an argument deployed against AWS. The question should really be: “Where do you start?” The starting point should surely be the least represented sections of society with the greatest biases against them.
Men are overrepresented, while non-white members are marginally underrepresented, with private schooling overrepresented in the Labour Shadow Cabinet by around 400 per cent. It would appear that schooling is a massive factor governing outcomes, even in the Labour party.
Though Labour does much better than the Tories it should be more reflective about this bias that attacks the most fundamental of the party’s beliefs about equality of opportunity for all through equality of education. This is particularly important during the reign of Messieurs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, a fact senior Conservative backbencher David Davis remarked upon this week.
He observed that there is no one at the top of the government “from backgrounds where they had to scrape for the last penny at the end of the week”, adding:
“They don’t have a sense of what a large part of the country, the poorer part of the country, what their views and priorities are.”
A point also made by Dominic Sandbrook in today’s Mail:
“… very few senior Tories come from a relatively poor background. And when ordinary families, already feeling the pinch as the economy slides back towards recession, are confronted with pictures of George Osborne on the Klosters ski slopes, they could be forgiven for wondering whether we really are all in this together.
“Although our politicians often refuse to admit it, the truth is that the state of Westminster is a damning indictment of the death of social mobility…
“For all their gushing rhetoric about change and inclusiveness, MPs of all parties tend to look remarkably similar. And for all their talk about diversity, it is worth noting that a pitiful 11 out of 306 Tory MPs are black or Asian, while Labour boasts just 16 and the Lib Dems none at all.
“The figures on education are even more revealing. Of our 119 Government ministers, 66 per cent went to public schools, compared with only 7 per cent of the population as a whole. And what is more, a staggering 10 per cent went to just one school, Eton.”
The Labour party has worked hard to push up the number of women and non-white members in positions of authority and profile, and though there is still plenty of work to be done, both the members who have filled these positions and the party itself deserve praise. They are role models of which we should be proud.
However, along with this process the party must examine what it is and what equality really means. At our heart, do we not stand fundamentally opposed to privileges or disadvantages endowed by the accident of birth? The ability to attend a private school is one such privilege and given the bias exhibited in the Labour party, members should be concerned and sending a message about it.
The overrepresentation of high profile, privately schooled Labour Members of Parliament sends a message to the party, to kids going to private schools and to kids going to state schools about where they stand in society. It also sends a message to the wider public about who Labour is and who is chosen to represent the party. A discussion about a limit on the overrepresentation of privately educated members in the shadow cabinet, for example, would show the party to be serious and sincere about its values and the vision is has of society.
The issue of schooling is fundamental to who we are as a political movement. Perhaps we should be tackling it with the same self-inspection, vigour and energy that we have tackled other issues of prejudice and injustice.
41 Responses to “Private schooling goes right to the heart of who we are”
JC
The alternative to all this is to use the free market approach of improving state education to a level that private schools can no longer offer an advantage.
Or divide the population into a large number of separate groupings (does anyone campaign for the left-handed? Are they under-represented in parliament?) and try to balance the representation of these groupings. Does it make sense to require all labour candidates to be state educated? Should they all have worked in manufacturing and be members of trade unions before selection? Who do they represent anyway? Is it the constituancy or the party?
Nearly there Andrew Neil, but we need to nationalise education not restore grammar schools « LeftCentral
[…] defeat and a higher number of Tory MPs. But the privately-educated are over-represented by 400% in the Shadow Cabinet, and Neil claimed that only 6 of Labour’s 60 new MPs are from a […]
Silop
Isn’t it interesting that in their haste to tackle spending cuts the Tories have apparently overlooked reforming the charitable status afforded to public schools?
WHAT?
@Roger
What a ridiculous comment about sport and music. Exactly the same (false) logic that the article espouses on politics:
We pick our sports players and musicians based on skill level and ability. Nothing to do with their education whatsoever. To suggest that we should be inherently biased against a rugby player because he was educated at a public school is as illogical as being bias against all darts players because they’re fat. For one, it’s not necessarily correct (only just more likely than in the entire populace) and secondly why does it matter? No matter who you are, if you’re the best player, you’ll be on the team. If you write the best songs, you get the music contract.
We’re not going around demanding 4% of chefs have to be a Muslim, or 1.6% of painters have to be Pakistani so why should we demand it of any other profession.
MPs are elected because the majority of voting constituents think they are the best candidate for the job. The choice is based on ability for the role (though I cede this may be due to a voters internal perceived opinion of a ‘tory’ or ‘labour’ candidate rather than on a complete study of their personal ability). In no way should we interfere with this meritocracy.
AWS and enforced quotas of ethnicity are both wrong. Ensuring that X% of candidates conform to quota X can only occur at the detriment of better, non-X prospective candidates. Rather, we should encourage more women and ethnic minorities to get into politics, work with them, promote the idea of standing for public office etc but not preference them over others.
“Where will it end?” is a valid question. It’d be wrong if we officially preferred white, privately-educated men over everyone else, so why is it not wrong to prefer everyone else over them?
Matt Gwilliam
Thank you for your comments. I thought I should try and answer some of them.
In general, I would like to point out that this article proposes no national policy and am not someone who would like to ban private schools. This article is about an overrepresentation in parliament, in particular the shadow cabinet and trying to stimulate debate on it. I would also like to say that halving the number of privately educated shadow ministers would still over represent private schools by a factor of 2, a factor that would allow an all male cabinet, so this would hardly be a draconian act of taking a principle to extremes.
I guess my question is: “would it be a massive leap to go from all-women-BAME-shortlists to all-women-BAME-state-educated shortlists?” Is this a logical extension or not necessary? Are we happy with this over representation.
Tom: “..not poor, but not posing on Klosters ski slopes..” I’m very aware of this and I’m also very aware that some parents work very hard and make sacrifices to send their kids to a good school. Some move to send their kids to an excellent state school (which like paying for private school is another example of wealth being used to leverage better education for their children). I’m not saying that any of this is wrong or shouldn’t be happening or even honourable. My point was that there is a massive overrepresentation of privately schooled in the positions of authority. Does this have an impact on how well represented the society at large is? Do privately educated people have a largely different experience from their 93% state educated fellow citizens and if so doesn’t this also have implications for how we are governed? I disagree that coming from a similar socio-economic background means you must have similar life-experiences if you had completely different schooling experiences. I think that school makes up large portion of people’s life experiences and significantly affects their outlook on life.
Mark Stevo: Good point, well argued and eloquently put.
Debalini: I’m not totally sure of your tone but I assume you were being pretty negative. This article did not suggest a national policy or a party-wide policy (I refer you to comments I made to Tom). It suggested a debate about the number of privately educated in the higher echelons of UK politics, particularly the shadow cabinet. Red Whale suggested an equivalency with AWS. I think this may be a false equivalency but it should be discussed. Is going to or having the ability to go to private school not a similarly major factor in governing outcomes and your outlook on life? If it is (and as many people argue Cameron must be out of touch because of his background, in particular Eton, it would appear a lot of people think so) then should we be tackling the representation problem in a similar way to how we tackled low representation of women.
Julian: “To be consistent, you should surely go back to who you select as MPs.” To be consistent with what? The policy on AWS? My point is that only 7% of the population is privately educated and that I would ask, given the fact that 15% of the PLP, 30% of the shadow cabinet and 66% of the cabinet is privately educated, does private education give you advantages more then just better grades and academic ability? If it does, then doesn’t it also follow that this is a bought privilege and skews us away from principles of meritocracy. If a massively disproportionate number of MPs have different perspectives on life to begin with, surely this is poor for democracy. As for “Oxbridge”, I would argue that these institutions are for more meritocratic then private schools, which is a bought privilege. That said, if everyone in parliament had gone to Oxbridge, it would be concerning under the same kind of principles. In any case, your attempt to defeat the main thrust of the article by saying “where do you stop?”, I thought I’d dealt with in the article and would be interested in your thoughts on my rebuttal. It’s about where you start and you start with the biggest non-meritocratic biases.
Tom2: I would also be interested in some evidence based blogging on this. Alas, I am not an educationalist and am there are already plenty of people on the web who talk rubbish on the subject of schooling and outcomes who have no idea what they’re talking about, so I was trying to avoid joining them. My point is about an over representation in politics and its implications. I would be interested in your thoughts on Red Whale’s (perhaps false) equivalency with AWS and the arguments for AWS. Some of the arguments against AWS: it was tokenism, did not deal with the root causes of sexism and bias, would lead to talent being lost. We did it anyway so I assume these arguments were either defeated, or it was deemed worth it.
Roger: This article proposes a discussion about a quota in one place alone: the shadow cabinet. In the same way as a quota was proposed for women. I would be interested in your thoughts on the difference between them and why this is a less worth proposal.
Mr. Sensible: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00y37gk/Posh_and_Posher_Why_Public_School_Boys_Run_Britain/