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”
Mr. Sensible
Cheers for the link, Matt.
Mark Stevo
Short and to the point, unlike the ramble above. Don’t they teach the value of conciseness any more?
Tom
Matt,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I would like to pick one bone:
“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.”
As somebody who went to a fairly middling private school, I think there is truth in this but it can also be overstated. In my own experience, whether or not my friends and colleagues went to a private school is no more a marker of their life experiences and their understanding of others’ lives than their parents’ wealth, the part of the country they are from, their choice of career and voluntary activities, and their current financial circumstances.
Unless you have personally visited every private school up and down the country, or even a representative sample, I think it’s hard for you to say they have a “significant” and similar effect on people’s outlook on life.
13eastie
@13 Richard
Re. your obtuse misconstrual of my parody of the OP’s quota ‘logic’:
FOR THE RECORD: There are a great many sane reasons for voters to eschew Ms Harman. Such a list should include neither her genealogy nor her schooling. Ditto Mr Khan.
If vile hypocrisy is what you seek, hang around a little longer with the “positive” discriminators until they invent an irrelevant objection to a trait that fate has bestowed on *you*.
Matt Gwilliam
Tom,
I think I know what you’re saying but:
I don’t have to visit every man and woman in the country to say that men and women tend to have different experiences of the world.
I acknowledge that there are private schools and then there are private schools but on the whole there is a difference between the private and state sectors (otherwise the private sector wouldn’t exist). I often find that when raising this issue people assume I myself, and everyone I’ve ever met went to state school, never had the opportunity to go to a private school and do not appreciate that all private schools are not like Eton. My point is that privately educated make up four times as much of the shadow cabinet then the general population and to ask is this acceptable and is it entirely meritocratic? Of course, this one fact about somebody’s background does not adequately describe them and there experience and this article proposes against private schools.
I acknowledge that I’m now straying into conjecture and anecdote but I suspect the average privately educated 16 year olds probably has less friends who have special needs or have unemployed parents then the average state comp 16 year old. Would this not shape your impressionable mind?
13eastie: Plenty of positive discriminators are discriminate against me yet I obviously find the chip on my shoulder a little easier to bare, partly because I acknowledge that there is a problem and it needs to be tackled.
Also who are ‘they’?