'What Politics Taught Me': Yanis Varoufakis

 

Privilege doesn't start with The Rich

 Janan Ganesh in The FT 

There is a standard-issue Russian tycoon called Dimitry on board the yacht. There is a social klutz who is something in tech. There is, in a gallant stab at originality, an arms-trading couple in the November of their lives.  

When a storm sinks this ship of fools, beaching them on an island, the dominion of passengers over crew starts to flip. You see, the rich are all thumbs when it comes to survival skills. The toilet attendant can harpoon fish and make fires. (Poor people famously attend Navy Seals camp when young.) Watch her become queen of the island. Watch a male model give her some loving for extra rations.  

Triangle of Sadness, while an unworthy Palme d’Or winner, whacks the super-rich entertainingly enough. But here’s a thing. I too have a cleaner. And that puts me in a minority of the public. I dine out most nights, and with some fussiness, which further narrows the economic company that I keep. Last month, I incurred a £25 surcharge rather than keep an appointment with a Sky crew who were coming to install a dish. I couldn’t be bothered to race home from coffee with a friend and it was losable cash. 

I am just 'upper middle class'. But my life is one of late-Roman decadence next to that of the median earner. If you are a corporate lawyer (not even a partner) so is yours. If you send your children to a private school, or live in the catchment area of an acclaimed state one, so, most likely, is yours. 

Much too much is made of the super-rich. And it is made by an upper middle class that is hardly more in touch with the national average. Take it from a social climber of some aptitude. Take it from a veteran of (I reckon) each household income decile since the age of five. The inflection point on the economic scale comes much earlier than you think. Something dramatic happens between, say, £30,000 a year and £130,000: a sharper change in the texture of life than occurs between the second number and a million. The first jump affects what you can do. The second tends to affect merely how.  

The upper middle class can rent in nice districts of world-class cities. The rich can buy there. The average can do neither. The upper middle class can fly to another continent. The rich can fly business. The average must plan and economise to do either. Having passed through the same universities, the upper middle class and the rich are often of a cultural feather. Diplomat can speak unto hedgie. How often does either befriend a nongraduate Band 5 NHS nurse? Or marry one? 

The obsession with a small overclass distorts public life in all sorts of ways. One is a sort of innumerate confusion in politics. No, you won’t fund the welfare state of your dreams by squeezing plutocrats alone. (Nordic taxes ask a lot of the merely well-off.) And no, inheriting £800,000 of property isn’t normal. 

Another is bad art, the kind that fancies itself subversive but spares most of its audience. There is always a painting or video installation nowadays about the cupidity of those able to buy it. That the curator, the agent and even the front-of-house team live lives of pure exotica next to the national average gets lost in the righteous gaze up at the one per cent of the one per cent. 

This is where Triangle goes wrong. In having to reach so far up the income scale to find bad behaviour, the film achieves the opposite effect of its intended anti-elitism. It absolves everyone south of the Coutts current account income threshold.

If Ruben Östlund, the director, thinks the mistreatment of service staff is peculiar to the super-rich, I have a film proposal for him about the cafés of London. Opening scene: the press-ganging of a waitress as auxiliary childcare by yuppie parents. When the upper middle class are rude, it is precisely because they have to try to put distance between themselves and the service class. With the richest, the gap is too obvious to need underlining. At times, it seems, good manners do cost something. 

Privilege - The Dark Secret behind Bill Gates

 

English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT

Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.

Reservations for OBCs - The latest SC judgement

Bhadra Sinha in The Print


Reservation is not at odds with merit, but furthers proper distribution of opportunities, the Supreme Court said Thursday in a detailed judgment that revealed the reasons for its 7 January interim order upholding 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the All India Quota (AIQ) for undergraduate and postgraduate medical admissions.

Merit, a bench of justices D.Y. Chandrachud and A.S. Bopanna held, should be “socially contextualised and reconceptualised as an instrument” to advance “social goods like equality” and not just be “reduced to narrow definitions of performance in an open competitive examination”.

“High scores in an examination are not a proxy for merit,” the bench said.

“Competitive examinations assess basic current competency to allocate educational resources but are not reflective of excellence, capabilities and potential of an individual which are also shaped by lived experiences, subsequent training and individual character,” the court said. They “do not reflect the social, economic and cultural advantage that accrues to certain classes and contributes to their success in such examinations”.

With its order on 7 January, the bench had given a green signal to counselling for medical courses that got delayed on account of the hearing in SC challenging OBC quota and reservation for the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) in AIQ for medical admissions.

While it had declared OBC reservation as valid, it did not pronounce any opinion on the EWS quota. The court had doubts over the eligibility criterion, fixed at Rs 8 lakh annual income limit, to determine an EWS candidate. The top court is expected to hear detailed arguments on the EWS issue in March this year. However, as an interim arrangement, it had allowed EWS admissions on the basis of the existing threshold.
 
‘No prohibition for OBC reservation in PG courses’

Thursday’s judgment — authored by Justice Chandrachud — specifically ruled that there was no prohibition on introducing reservation for OBCs in postgraduate courses, negating the argument that the impact of backwardness simply disappears because a candidate has a graduate qualification.

A graduate qualification, in the court’s opinion, may provide certain social and economic mobility, but that by itself does not create parity between forward and backward classes.

The court declined to accept the argument that undeserving candidates benefitted from reservation. It pointed out that OBC candidates who fall in the creamy layer are excluded from taking this benefit.

Reservations ensure distribution of opportunity in such a way that backward classes are equally able to benefit from them, since opportunities “evade them because of structural barriers”, the court said. This is the only way merit can be a “democratising force that equalises inherited disadvantages and privileges”.

“Otherwise claims of individual merit are nothing but tools of obscuring inheritances that underlie achievements,” added the court.

Interpreting Articles 15(4), 15(5)

The bench interpreted Articles 15 (4) and 15 (5) of the Constitution to hold that the two are not exceptions to Article 15 (1). Rather, they become a restatement of a particular facet of the rule of substantive equality that has been set out in Article 15 (1).

Article 15 (1) prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, sex, or place of birth, Article 15 (4) capacitates the state to create special arrangements for promoting the interest and welfare of socially and educationally backward classes, and Article 15 (5) provides for reservation for socially and educationally backward classes in educational institutions.

The court held that Article 15 (5) does not make any distinction between UG and PG medical courses. It said although it has been held that there should be no reservation in super-speciality courses, it was never ruled that reservations in medical PG courses are impermissible.

Articles 15 (4) and 15 (5) employ group identification methods to achieve substantive equality. The court admitted that this could lead to an incongruity where individual members of an identified group receiving the benefit of reservation may not be backward, or individuals of a non-identified group may share certain characteristics of backwardness with members of an identified group.

“The individual difference may be a result of privilege, fortune, or circumstances but it cannot be used to negate the role of reservation in remedying the structural disadvantage that certain groups suffer,” the order added.

In the judges’ opinion, open competitive exams can be termed an equal opportunity if there is equality in the availability and access to educational facilities. Inequalities in this segment have deprived certain classes of people from participating effectively in competitions.

Therefore, according to the court, “special provisions (like reservation) enable such disadvantaged classes to overcome the barriers they face in effectively competing with forward classes and thus ensuring substantive equality”.

‘Privileges of social network, cultural capital’

The judge spoke at length about the “privileges” available to the forward classes, not just in terms of schooling and coaching centres, but also social networks and cultural capital (communication skills, accent or academic accomplishments), most of which is inherited.

Cultural capital ensures the child is trained unconsciously by the familial environment and gives an edge to such children over individuals who do not have the benefit of such facilities.

“They (OBC) have to put in surplus effort to compete with their peers from the forward communities,” the verdict said.

But for the forward classes, a combination of family habitus, community linkages and inherited skills work to the advantage of individuals belonging to certain classes, which is then classified as merit, reproducing and reaffirming social hierarchies, the ruling said.

Taking reference from an earlier judgment in the case of B.K. Pavithra versus the Union of India, which said apparent neutral systems of examination perpetuate social inequalities, the court observed “it is necessary to understand that merit is not solely of one’s own making”.

The “exclusionary standard of merit serves to denigrate the dignity of those who face barriers in their advancement which are not of their own making”, the court said, advocating a deeper scrutiny of the “idea of merit based on scores in an exam”.

Standardised measures such as examination results are not the most accurate assessment of the qualitative difference between candidates.

“At the best, an examination can only reflect the current competence of an individual but not the gamut of their potential, capabilities or excellence, which are also shaped by lived experiences, subsequent training and individual character. The meaning of merit itself cannot be reduced to marks even if it is a convenient way of distributing educational resources,” the court said, adding that the meaning of merit must be reconceptualised.

Michael Holding on Racism

 

Sixth-formers able to haggle for top UK universities under new grading system

Experts warn ‘sharp-elbowed’ middle classes more likely to talk their way into places as institutions look to expand writes Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian

A-level results day at Rochdale sixth form a year ago. This year, experts say, students will have much more power to negotiate their university places. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer 

School leavers may feel that, with A-level exams cancelled, they have lost control over their future. But experts say they have never had more power to talk their way into their first-choice university, even if they miss their grades.

As sixth-formers nervously await next month’s teacher-assessed results from the exams regulator, Ofqual, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that in the aftermath of coronavirus, the UK higher education sector is facing losses of between £3bn and £19bn in the new academic year, depending on how many students enrol.

Many universities expect to lose 50-100% of their lucrative international student intake, a blow that will hit the most selective institutions hardest. While they have agreed to a government cap on student numbers to maintain stability, it was set with enough room for successful universities to increase UK student numbers to make up some of the shortfall.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says: “The way they are grading A-levels this year gives [young people] much more room to negotiate. You can easily ring and make a case for being let in based on your grades being wrong.”
He says that if universities have lots of empty seats this year they will be “in compulsory redundancy territory”.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University, agrees school leavers have “an unusual level of power this time”. In ordinary years universities, particularly the elite ones, have been wary of letting in too many applicants with lower grades for fear it could affect their position in the all-important league tables.

Marginson predicts this year could be different. “No one loses competitive position if everyone shifts the same way at the same time, as seems likely. The name of the game is organisational survival and everyone knows that.”

However, many academics are concerned that more disadvantaged candidates might be less likely to negotiate offers and hunt down good places in clearing.

Barnaby Lenon, former head of Harrow public school and chair of the Independent Schools Council, has urged university admission authorities to look beyond “dodgy” A-level grades, which “could be wrong”, when deciding who to admit.

Everyone has heard tales of middle-class parents picking up the phone to Oxford or Cambridge to argue for their child’s place. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, says: “Never underestimate the adeptness of the sharp-elbowed middle classes at exploiting opportunities. And no opportunity is more prized than a place at a prestigious university.”

Elliot Major worries that next month’s frantic last-minute market for places may further skew the playing field against poorer young people. “There is a genuine fear that many disadvantaged pupils who would have excelled in their A-levels this year will be penalised with lower scores by the system of calculated grades, which estimates grades on the basis of historical averages of schools,” he says.

Some believe Ucas, the admissions service, is not helping. Mark Corver, former director of analysis and research at Ucas and now founder of dataHE consultancy, has warned the government there is not enough detailed data publicly available to allow students and teachers to prove if the Ofqual grading process has gone wrong for them.

“We’ve asked Ucas repeatedly to release some simple tables showing the typical exam grades that applicants with different predicted grades get in a normal year. They have steadfastly refused,” he says. “We’ve found them reluctant and obstructive. Given they are a charity and not a commercial organisation, it’s very disappointing.”

However, Richard O’Kelly, head of analytical data at Ucas, denies the organisation is being obstructive. He says it cannot publish the data set, which breaks down results by factors including gender, ethnicity and social background, because it creates an “unacceptable risk” of individual applicants being identifiable. He adds: “We have published more data during this year than ever before to promote confidence amongst students and universities.”

Sophie Hatton, an 18-year-old school leaver from Birmingham, says she is feeling “increasingly anxious” waiting for her A-level grades. “At first I thought it was great having all my exams cancelled. Then it hit me how terrifying it is that two years of work could account for nothing as I have no full way of showing my potential.”

Hatton is hoping to study sociology at Nottingham Trent University, but she says that if she doesn’t get the grades she needs she will get on the phone and try to negotiate, “to prove I am a determined, hard-working student”.

Kate Spalding, another 18-year-old waiting for her results, in Southampton, says she was upset for days after hearing she could not sit her exams: “I felt all my work had gone to waste.” Now, she says, she has decided to trust her teachers and is feeling more confident.

She is planning a gap year, but if she does not get the grades she needs to study drama at Manchester or Leeds, she intends to retake her A-levels later in the year.

Despite the government’s cap on student numbers this year, with financial penalties for those that exceed it, many selective institutions are planning for expansion, within the boundary of an extra 5% on last year’s enrolment forecasts.

Prof Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the Russell Group, says his university is anticipating a 2% growth in UK student numbers this year. “Given the way the cap has been set, it is conceivable that quite a few selective universities will take marginally more students than last year, and altogether that could be quite a lot,” he says.

Yet Riordan admits that for institutions such as his, international students and not UK ones make the real financial difference – and their numbers will be unclear until October or November. “Really we won’t know how many international students we will get until they actually turn up – or don’t,” he says.

Vice-chancellors say the way A-levels are being calculated this year is making them nervous. Another Russell Group head, who asked not to be named, says: “We have thousands of students who have put us as first choice and accepted our offer. Usually we can be pretty accurate on what percentage will achieve the grades. But this year if there is even 10% inflation on that, that’s a big difference.”

The government has confirmed, in new guidance issued earlier this month, that it will not penalise universities for going over their cap because a larger number of students than expected meet their offer grades. But the vice-chancellor says that, in a Covid-19 world, a big increase would put pressure on facilities. “There are two nightmares: one where no one turns up, and one where everyone turns up while we are trying to do social distancing,” he says.

If prestigious institutions expand, they could suck up some students who might have chosen mid-ranking universities, leaving some of those institutions without enough undergraduates – and their £9,250 a year fees. Marginson says this would leave universities at the bottom of the sector “facing very difficult times”.

Dean Machin, head of policy at the University of Portsmouth, agrees. “We have potentially got the worst of both worlds. For sector stability we enabled government to control the number of people who go to university – and unfortunately it is unlikely to provide all universities the protection they were seeking.”

The Office for Students regulator is consulting on new powers to intervene faster to protect students in case any universities or colleges are at risk of closure.

Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

It’s time for white people to step up for black colleagues

 The protests in the US are a pivotal moment and people of colour need active allyship  writes Nicola Rollock in The Financial Times  

A very privileged white man recently told me with an indulgent chuckle how much he enjoyed his privilege. I was not amused. For people of colour, white privilege and power shape our lives, restrict our success and, as we were starkly reminded in recent weeks, can even kill. No matter how well-crafted an organisation’s equality and diversity policy, the claims of “tolerance” or the apparent commitment to “embracing diversity”, whiteness can crush them all — and often does. 

People of colour know this. We do not need the empirical evidence to tell us that black women are more likely to die in childbirth or that black boys are more likely to be excluded from school even when engaging in the same disruptive behaviour as their white counterparts. We did not need to wait for a study to tell us that people with “foreign sounding names” have to send 74 per cent more applications than their white counterparts before being called for an interview — even when the qualifications and experience are the same.  

Or that young people of colour, in the UK, are more likely to be sentenced to custody than their white peers. We do not need more reviews to tell us we are not progressing in workplaces at the same rate as our white colleagues. We already know. Many of us spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to work out how to survive the rules that white people make and benefit from.  

While many white people seem to have discovered the horrors of racism as a result of George Floyd’s murder, it would be a mistake to overlook the pervasive racism happening around us every day. For the truth is Floyd’s murder sits at the chilling end of a continuum of racism that many of us have been talking about, shouting and protesting about for decades. 

Whiteness — specifically white power — sits at the heart of racism. This is why white people are described as privileged. Privilege does not simply refer to financial or socio-economic status. It means living without the consequences of racism. Stating this is to risk the ire of most white people. They tend to become defensive, angry or deny that racism is a problem, despite the fact they have not experienced an entire life subjected to it.  

Then there are the liberal intellectuals who believe they have demonstrated sufficient markers of their anti-racist credentials because they have read a bit of Kimberlé Crenshaw — the academic who coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how different forms of oppression intersect. Or, as we have seen on Twitter, there are those who quote a few lines from Martin Luther King.  

Liberal intellectuals will happily make decisions about race in the workplace, argue with people of colour about race, sit on boards or committees or even become race sponsors without doing any work to understand their whiteness and how it has an impact on their assumptions and treatment of racially minoritised groups.  

There are, of course, white people who imagine themselves anti-racist while doing little if anything to impact positively on the experiences of people of colour. As the author Marlon James and others have stated, being anti-racist requires action: it is not a passive state of existence. 

Becoming aware of whiteness and challenging passivity or denial is an essential component of becoming a white ally. Being an ally means being willing to become the antithesis of everything white people have learnt about being white. Being humble and learning to listen actively are crucial, as a useful short video from the National Union of Students points out. This, and other videos, are easily found on YouTube and are a very accessible way for individuals and teams to go about educating themselves about allyship.  

White allies do not pretend the world is living in perfect harmony, nor do they ignore or trivialise race. If the only senior Asian woman is about to leave an organisation where Asian women are under-represented and she is good at her job, white allies will flag these points to senior management and be keen to check whether there is anything that can be done to keep her. White allies are not quiet bystanders to potential or actual racial injustice.  

Allyship also means letting go of the assumption that white people get to determine what constitutes racism. This is highlighted by the black lesbian feminist writer and journalist Kesiena Boom, who has written a 100-point guide to how white people can make life less frustrating for people of colour. (Sample point: “Avoid phrases like “But I have a Black friend! I can’t be racist!” You know that’s BS, as well as we do.”) 

Active allyship takes effort 

Being an ally means seeing race and acknowledging that white people have a racial identity. In practical terms, it means when we talk about gender, acknowledging that white women’s experiences overlap with but are different to those of women of colour. White women may be disadvantaged because of their gender, but they are privileged because of their racial identity. When we talk about social mobility, employment, education, health, policing and even which news is reported and how, race plays a role. Usually it is white people who are shaping the discourse and white people who are making the decisions. 

This is evident even when white people promise commitment to racial justice in the workplace. It is usually white people who make the decision about who to appoint, the resources they will be given, what they can say and do. In their book Acting white? Rethinking race in post-racial America, US scholars Devon W Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that white institutions tend to favour and progress people of colour who are “racially palatable” and who will do little to disrupt organisational norms. Those who are more closely aligned to their racial identity are unlikely to be seen as a fit and are, consequently, less likely to succeed.  

Being a white ally takes work. It is a constant process, not a static point one arrives at and can say the job is complete. It is why despite equalities legislation, there remains a need for organisations — many of them small charities operating on tight budgets — such as the Runnymede Trust, StopWatch, InQuest, Race on the Agenda, brap and Equally Ours. Their publications offer useful resources and information about racial justice in the workplace as well as in other sectors.  

There is, of course, a dark perversity to white allyship that is not often mentioned in most debates about racial justice. White allyship means divesting from the very histories, structures, systems, assumptions and behaviours that keep white people in positions of power. And, generally, power is to be maintained, not relinquished.

Just 2.6% of grammar school pupils are from poor backgrounds

Daniel Boffey in The Guardian

Just 3,100 of the 117,000 pupils who currently attend grammar schools come from families poor enough to be eligible for free school meals.

----Also read

Grammar schools are unfair. Principled parents must refuse to encourage them

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The proportion of students (2.6%) is lower than previously reported, and was last night seized upon by critics of the government’s plans for more selection in the state system.

The average proportion of pupils entitled to free school meals in areas that currently select on academic ability is thought to be around 18%.

Lucy Powell, the former shadow education secretary, said the figures, compiled by the House of Commons library from Department for Education records from January this year, illustrated how selection was failing those from the least affluent backgrounds.

“Grammar schools have a shamefully low record when it comes to the number of children from poor backgrounds attending them,” said Powell.

Ofsted chief slams Theresa May’s ‘obsession’ with grammar schools

The government’s green paper on education reform proposes that existing grammar schools should be allowed to expand and new ones be allowed to open, while existing comprehensives could opt to be selective. It also proposes encouraging multi-academy trusts to select within their family of schools, in order to set up “centres of excellence” for their most able students.

But Powell said there were now 23 Tory MPs who supported her campaign to force a government U-turn on their plans to introduce more selection. “All the evidence shows that selective education creates barriers for disadvantaged children rather than breaking them down,” she said. “These figures tell the real story. A minuscule number of children on free school meals pass the 11-plus.

“That these tiny, tiny few do well is no measure. The measure should be how can we ensure that every child gets an excellent academic education.

“Rather than serving a privileged few, ministers should focus on tackling real disadvantage and ensure that all schools have enough teachers and resources to deliver a world class education for all – things that are in serious trouble right now.”

The government’s policy was nevertheless given a boost last week when new “value-added figures” suggested that the 163 grammar schools in England had better progress scores across all attainment levels than the other 2,800 state secondaries, achieving about a third of a GCSE grade higher than pupils with the same prior results at other schools. The new “Progress 8 measures” record pupils’ progress across eight subjects from age 11 to 16.

Education secretary Justine Greening said the statistics gave the government “even more reason to make more of these good school places available in more areas”.

Rebecca Allen, director of Education Datalab and an expert in the analysis of large scale administrative and survey datasets, warned that ministers should be cautious in latching on to “crude” performance tests. Allen said that the Key Stage 2 scores used to test the progress of pupils in the years up to their GCSEs was a poor indicator of academic potential, as indicated by the fact that many with low scores passed the 11-plus.

She said that it would be better to examine progress across the board in local authorities that are selective. Those results show a marginally positive set of results in terms of progress of all pupils.

However, Allen said that even then the potential of a cohort of pupils in areas where grammars exist may well be higher in the first place because pupils could have been drawn from outside the area, distorting any analysis on a local authority by local authority basis.

Allen added that the statistics also did not take into account the distorting effect on the figures produced by those who would have otherwise stayed in private education who have moved into state grammar schools where they are available.

“These calculations are made only for those in the state sector, yet the presence of grammar schools changes the type of pupils in private schools,” she said. “About 12 per cent of those in grammars were in the private sector at age 10 and may well have stayed there had state-selection not been available.

“Moreover, large numbers who fail the 11-plus exit the state sector for non-elite private schools. It is very hard to assess how these private sector transfers affect local authority Progress 8 figures, so we must be cautious before using crude performance table measures to make claims about policy effectiveness.”

Why is cricket so reluctant to embrace meritocracy?

Tim Wigmore in Cricinfo


They are still called the golden team. In 1953, Hungary came to Wembley and eviscerated England 6-3 in the "Match of the Century". A year later, in the 1954 World Cup, Hungary defeated West Germany 8-3 and Brazil 4-2. In a run of 50 games, until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, they won 42 and lost only one - to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final.

Yet Euro 2016 was Hungary's first appearance in a major tournament for 30 years. While Hungary's decline is sad, it has been no impediment to football's growth. The most successful sport in the world allows teams to rise and, yes, fall based on merit. So do other sports that are expanding, like basketball, rugby and even baseball.

Cricket, though, takes a very different view. This is the context of the opposition to two divisions: the sport has never been run on merit. The very concept of full membership reflects a sport that has prioritised status above on-field results. That can be seen in how each of the ten Test nations retains permanent votes in the ICC board (while the three votes shared by the 95 Associates and Affiliates are effectively worthless), and how even after recent steps to increase funding for top Associates, Zimbabwe still receive about three times as much ICC revenue as Afghanistan and Ireland.

In all previous World Cups, all Full Members have received automatic qualification as a membership privilege. That will change in 2019, but only while the tournament is contracted to ten teams. And even now cricket refuses to embrace the concept of World Cup qualification being based on a fair and equal process, as has long been the norm in other major sports. Afghanistan and Ireland have a chance to qualify automatically through the ODI rankings table, but this is only a theoretical chance: Afghanistan haven't played a single ODI against a top-nine team since the last World Cup.

The idea of Test status has historically been the most egregious illustration of cricket's contempt for meritocracy. The acquisition and retention of status has always been based on politicking as much as cricket: when Pakistan gained independence, the country had to wait five years to gain full membership. Sri Lanka could have been elevated to Test status years before 1982. And when Bangladesh finally gained Test status in 2000 - their own attempts to win Test status upon independence, 29 years earlier, had failed - they had lost five of the six ODIs they had played against Kenya, whose own application was rejected, in the three years leading up to then. When a member of the Kenyan board later made this point to an ICC official, the response was instructive: "You do not have 100 million people."

So when Sri Lanka Cricket's president Thilanga Sumathipala said, "If someone wants to come up - they can come up, that's no problem", he should really know better. Even the much-vaunted Test Challenge demands that a new team win their first ever series, something no country has ever done, and makes no mention of making the 11th Test side a Full Member too. When opponents of two divisions in Tests speak of how "the smaller countries will lose out" if divisions are introduced, it is clear they are thinking only of Full Members, and not the 95 Associates and Affiliates.
The very administrators charged with maintaining fair play on the pitch - by being vigilant against match-fixing and ball-tampering - often seem determined to avoid it off the field, by preventing emerging countries getting a fair opportunity to rise.

This aversion to merit belittles cricket. It has acted as a roadblock to new teams emerging: Ben Amafrio, executive general manager at Cricket Australia, said recently that cricket has only gained one competitive new team - Sri Lanka - in the last 40 years. In growing the sport, cricket has been dwarfed not merely by football but baseball, basketball and rugby too. This means that many wondrous talents, from Steve Tikolo to Mohammad Shahzad and Hamid Hassan, have rarely had the chance to show the best of themselves. Worse, it has meant that countless other talents have been lost to mainstream international cricket before they have ever had the chance. Names like Muralitharan, Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva and Sangakkara would not resonate in the same way had they been unfortunate enough to play in the pre-1982 generation of Sri Lankan cricket, when they could do nothing to gain Test status.

Rejecting meritocracy also damages the standard of cricket - not just because of the talent that does not get to play with the elite but because it allows existing Full Members to get away with an underperforming team without real consequence. This was the point made by New Zealand Cricket chief executive David White recently, when he said that two divisions would "make people look at their high-performance programmes and their systems, so the product of Test cricket will improve as well". It is a lesson that other sports long ago learned.

Meritocracy does not tolerate the stasis and misgovernance that has characterised boards in Sri Lanka, West Indies, Zimbabwe and beyond for far too long. Former Zimbabwe coach Dav Whatmore recently pointed out that ZC are "getting US$ 8-9 million a year and they've got a debt of almost $20m".

Such ICC funding would have gone much further had it been allocated to countries on the basis of merit, not status. And not only have Full Members received far more ICC money, they have also been free of scrutiny in how they spend it. The ICC has long mandated that all Associates and Affiliates submit their financial statements every year, to show where every cent of their ICC funding is going, yet only this year ensured that Full Members do the same.

Where competition has been genuinely embraced, it has led to huge improvements in the quality of the game. That much was recognised by Tim Anderson, the ICC's former head of global development, who said that at Associate and women's level, "the long-standing, merit-based event structures… have all provided building blocks for these improved performances, as has a funding model designed to incentivise and reward performance, not status", in an email to ICC members earlier this year. The contrast with the Full Members' attitude to meritocracy at the top of the men's game did not need to be spelled out.

Like the Hungarian football team and the West Indies cricket team, international teams decline. But while football and other sports allow other rising teams to take their place - and fallen giants to rise again - cricket does not. As sad as the decline of West Indies is, is it any sadder than the best players from Afghanistan, say, being denied the opportunity to play Test cricket because of the misfortune of their nationality?

Across all sports, fans and broadcasters value meritocracy, which gives games context and consequences for victory and defeat. It is this knowledge - and the reality of stagnating TV rights for all bilateral cricket, while those for domestic T20 leagues are soaring - that is now driving the ICC's attempts to introduce two divisions, and a 13-team ODI league. Without embracing the principles of merit, "cricket will lose fans and revenues, threatening its position in the marketplace," warns Simon Chadwick, a sports business expert.

So ingrained is cricket's conservatism that the notion of meritocracy in international cricket is now seen as something radical. In essence, though, it is an insurance policy to safeguard international cricket's future: both its number of competitive teams and its financial viability. Japan's victories over New Zealand and France in the Olympic rugby sevens were the latest reminder of how other sports are aggressively expanding, and in the process weaning themselves off a dangerous over-dependence upon a few countries. Yet cricket essentially retains its traditional colonial footprint, and its economics are still unhealthily reliant upon a coterie of nations - and above all India.

This means that if international cricket becomes even a little less lucrative in Australia, England and India - even if only through the rising appeal of domestic T20 leagues - the entire economy of the international game will suffer. Never mind the cricketing arguments for meritocracy; on a business level, that is poor risk management. The risk to international cricket's future lies not in meritocracy but in rejecting it.

Why boarding schools produce bad leaders

Nick Duffell in The Guardian

In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.

Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world.

I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?

It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.

Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.

Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run, which is why ex-boarders make the best spies.

Now attached to this internal structure instead of a parent, the boarding child survives, but takes into adulthood a permanent unconscious anxiety and will rarely develop what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In adulthood he sticks to the same tactics: whenever he senses a threat of being made to look foolish, he will strike. We see this in Cameron's over-reaction to Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM patronisingly insisted, as if she were the one upset and not he. The opposite benches loved it, of course, howling "Flashman!" (the public school bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they never take on the cause of these leadership defects.

Bullying is inevitable and endemic in 24/7 institutions full of abandoned and frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners often report that it ends up ruining home life, many years later. Bullying pervades British society, especially in politics and the media, but, like boarding, we normalise it. When, in 2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he would have striking public-sector workers shot, he was even defended by Cameron – it was apparently a bit of fun. No prizes for guessing where both men learned their styles. And no wonder that the House of Commons, with its adversarial architecture of Victorian Gothic – just like a public school chapel – runs on polarised debate and bullying.

Strategic survival has many styles: bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994 BBC documentary called The Making of Them, whose title I borrowed for my first book, young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. Viewers can witness the "strategic survival personality" in the process of being built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting on his Very Serious Face and staring at the camera, "has changed me, and the one thing I can do now is get used [to it]". This false independence, this display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as evident in the theatrical concern of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator.

The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence. Boris is so supremely confident that he needs neither surname nor adult haircut; he trusts his buffoonery to distract the public from what Conrad Black called "a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded the Occupy movement: "In the name of God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for 10 years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.

This anachronistic entitlement cannot easily be renounced: it compensates for years without love, touch or family, for a personality under stress, for the lack of emotional, relational and sexual maturation. In my new book, Wounded Leaders, I trace the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.

Recent evidence from neuroscience experts shows what a poor training for leaderships this actually is. In short, you cannot make good decisions without emotional information (Professor Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible brain without good attachments (Dr Sue Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if your heart has had to close down (Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain McGilchrist). These factors underpin Will Hutton's view that "the political judgments of the Tory party have, over the centuries, been almost continuously wrong".

With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means. Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind. In order to boost his standing with the rightwingers in his party, Cameron still thinks he can bully for concessions, make more supposedly "robust" vetos.

His European counterparts don't operate like this. Angela Merkel has held multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration. Though deadlocked at home, Barack Obama impressed both sides of British politics and in 2009 entered the hostile atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend the then-president Dmitry Medvedev and make headway on a difficult disarmament treaty. In a subsequent meeting with the real power behind the throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to expound for an hour on what hadn't worked in recent Russian-American relationships, before responding. Despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.

To change our politics, we'll have to change our education system. Today, most senior clinicians recognise boarding syndrome, several of whom recently signed a letter to the Observer calling for the end of early boarding. Its elitism ought to motivate the left. The Attlee government intended to disband the public schools, but not even Wilson's dared to. There's a cash problem: boarding is worth billions and has a massive lobby. Unlike most other European countries, our state does not contribute a per capita sum towards private education, so dismantling these schools, which still enjoy charitable status, would be costly. But can we really afford to sacrifice any more children for the sake of second-rate leadership?

Private education is guarded by an electric fence

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian


Employers are told to spot ‘potential not polish’, but polish is about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions – deliberately baffling to outsiders

 

‘As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works.’ Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy


Everyone stop being horrible to posh people! It’s not their fault they have everything. It’s the fault of the schools they went to. I blame the parents. They refuel the class system by sending their offspring to private schools because they are not entirely daft. As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works. It has worked through thick and thin. Its pupils may be both.

That 7% figure of people who are privately educated, and who run just about everything, has stalled. Sometimes, people like me squawk about it but, as I have never learned to talk proper, it’s dismissed as “the politics of envy”, an idiotic phrase that reduces justified politics to a personal grudge. Occasionally, though, one of the gilded boys has a go at levelling the playing field. They do love a playing field.

So here we have cabinet minister Matt Hancock (King’s) suggesting that employers check the socio-economic backgrounds of applicants to stop the 93% of us who did not go to private school being discriminated against. Don’t people put their schools down on their CVs anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to ask applicants if they knew much about skiing and refuse to interview anyone who did?

Still, Hancock’s vapid suggestion was enough to cause Lord Waldegrave, provost of Eton, to have a meltdown and complain that the privately educated could be discriminated against. The poor babies. How they bawl, not when the playing field is level but when anyone ventures near its electric fence.

All this came about as part of Cameron’s “life chances” agenda, some sort of baleful drivel about enhancing social mobility. It is patently obvious that social mobility does not start at a job interview but long before it. When employers are told to spot “potential not polish”, we may ask where on the periodic table this mysterious element “polish” appears.

I have never been able to locate it, that’s for sure. The idea that the existing system can be levelled out by allowing a few escapees from the lower orders into the public school milieu of law, politics, media, academia, judiciary and the City is somewhat cack-handed. For polish is surely about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions, a series of codes and signals that enable small gangs of people to recognise each other as clubbable, employable, breedable.

It is deliberately baffling to outsiders. When I first started working in the media I was astonished at how everyone seemed to know each other from college. Then I began to realise they had been in schools with “houses”, small class sizes and peculiar sports, and shared the assumption that everything that came out of their mouths was innately fascinating.

On a Radio 4 show, I heard a producer bemoan my “polytechnic accent”. At every meeting I would feel unwashed and somewhat dazed, however long I had spent getting ready. Class manifests as acute discomfort. It’s not about thinking a Findus Crispy Pancake is a nice dinner, it is shared assumptions about what matters.

Lynsey Hanley’s book Respectable charts extremely well her journey into the middle class and all the anxiety it produces. But it bears little relationship to my journey, because there are many different working-class cultures.

What is shared, though, is that to be working class in a middle-class environment requires you to learn certain codes, and once you learn a code you can deconstruct it. The condescending nature of all the guff on private school education is part of this code. This system produces the brightest and the best, if the brightest and the best means booming confidence, inflexible thinking and the regurgitation of specific histories. Thus we have a chancellor who, without studying economics, believes himself an expert on it, whatever the figures say, whatever renowned economists say. Private schools sell self-belief.

In working-class culture, self-belief is played out as bravado and different kinds of knowledge are valued. I don’t romanticise it, as it’s stultifying. Everything is about what can be shown: practical skills, big tellies, getting really dressed up. What can’t be shown, that which is abstract, is not to be dwelt on, so I am forever glad I got away.

Social mobility, though, involves living with restraint. One must bite one’s tongue in order not to bite the hand that feeds you. Do not be prejudiced against your superiors. Just accept they got into Oxbridge by dint of their brainiac qualities. It was simply handy that, while you spent your teenage years sitting on a wall, they were competing in debating societies, editing their own magazine or playing the harp.

Here is the mystical polish. Sadly the self-improving element of the working class beloved by the likes of Raymond Williams, enacted though evening classes and further education, has been killed dead. So, instead we have the engineers of social class suggesting they pull a few of us on to the lifeboats. It is no real answer. What is it about private education that I would want for more children? It is confidence. The confidence to ask whether those in charge are actually so much cleverer than the rest of us, the confidence to insist that employing a normal person is not discrimination, and most of all the confidence to know that “power can be taken, but not given”.

People who buy expensive cars enjoy killing pedestrians

Bridget Christie in The Guardian

Illustration: Nishant Choksi for the Guardian

 

As a standup comedian, I have a heightened sense of other people’s behaviour. In a room of 500 people, I can sniff out the one checking their watch, yawning and stretching their arms above their head. There are a myriad ways an audience member can display their apathy towards you. One standup friend, Joe Wilkinson, saw a piece of chewing gum fall out of a man’s open, dribbling mouth while he was doing his best stuff. I’ve had a man in the front row order himself a takeaway.

-----Watch video

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I think society is ruder than it used to be, and I’m not alone in thinking this. Paul Piff is an assistant professor in the department of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California. Last year, he wrote a paper titled Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behaviour. In layman’s terms, what Prof Piff is saying is, rich people are more likely to behave like twats than poor people are.

Piff proved his suspicions in a number of ways, many of them involving the use of hidden cameras. One of his experiments, which he shared during an unintentionally hilarious TEDx talk, meant getting some of his mates to stand at pedestrian crossings and monitor which cars stopped and which didn’t. Normal cars (ie ones that look like their sole purpose is to transport people safely from A to B without exploding) stopped – which, incidentally, they were legally obliged to do. “Status cars”, such as 4x4s, convertibles, sports cars, chariots and the Diamond Jubilee State Coach, did not. Piff had proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that people who buy expensive cars enjoy killing pedestrians, which definitely qualifies as unethical behaviour.

Another of Piff’s films showed two young men playing a rigged game of Monopoly. One player was given an unfair advantage: more money, two dice, a crash course in Received Pronunciation, a massive throne to sit on, an ermine cloak and the Sovereign’s Orb. The behaviour of this player changed rapidly. He started playing in an incredibly annoying, obnoxious way.

The most fascinating part, for me, was that, even though he knew he was at an unfair advantage, the player still believed he had won the game through personal skill. I thought immediately of George Osborne cutting the maintenance grant for Monopoly players from low-income families, and how this meant that working-class kids would now always lose at Monopoly, so won’t even bother trying to play any more.

Piff believes that being wealthy can make people less ethical, more selfish and less compassionate. “The rich are way more likely to prioritise their own self-interests above the interests of other people,” he says. “It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.” Yes, that’s right. There is a professor, called Piff, who used the word asshole in an academic study.

I’ve encountered a lot of assholes recently. And I have noticed, with alarmingly regularity, that when I call people out for, say, walking into the road in front of my car without looking because they were on their phone, I am verbally abused in return. The man who ordered his takeaway during my show seemed genuinely baffled as to why I even brought it up. He was hungry and needed to eat. What the hell was my problem?

We are living in an age of narcissistic entitlement, and I don’t think this is purely down to wealth or privilege. Technological advances, easy credit, bad parenting and pizza restaurants’ willingness to stock every conceivable topping has created a world in which everything is possible and available, where there is immediate and unlimited choice – except in the case of the Labour leadership, where our options have been severely limited.

In a recent documentary about the police, a female officer said she’d noticed a big change in young people’s behaviour, which she put down to bad parenting, a lack of discipline and contempt for authority figures. She said that because we don’t say “no” to our children, and instead use tantrum-averting language (“Well, I’d rather you didn’t punch me in the face repeatedly, darling, because it makes mummy upset”), young people don’t know how to respond to being reprimanded: they go into meltdown.

We interact with each other less and less. We shop online, communicate online, we watch bands and sunsets through our iPads and don’t care about the people standing behind us. We’re forgetting how to behave in the physical world. I don’t know how we address this. But a good place to start might be to call our children assholes when they’re being assholes. I’d also suggest arresting anyone who orders a takeaway during the punchline of a show.

Private schools know how to game elite universities – state-educated kids don’t have this privilege

The system fails bright pupils from ordinary backgrounds. And here’s how we all lose ...

• 
• • Paul Mason
  • The Guardian, Sunday 30 November 2014 20.00 GMT

'There is, in short, massive asymmetry of information in the post-16 education system and the critical determinant is class.' Photograph: Alamy

Let’s call him Matt. Aged 16, he is tall, taciturn and highly talented. He goes to a state school and is about to choose his A-levels. For all kinds of reasons, he believes he should progress, via Oxbridge or the Ivy League, to become an aerospace engineer.

So should he do further maths? If maths is the new rock’n’roll in education, then further maths is a VIP enclosure that fewer than 15,000 young people a year get into.

Last week, I had the chance to put this question to the deputy head of a top private school. “By all means do further maths, but only if you are guaranteed to get an A,” came the answer, as if it were a no-brainer. It was advice born out of years of practical knowledge.

Other opinions are available of course – and that’s the problem. This year, a quarter of a million 16-year-olds will make their A-level choices relying on hearsay, myth and information that is outdated or uncheckable. Those choices will shape their options when it comes to university – and the courses they apply for will then shape their chances of getting in.

There is, in short, massive asymmetry of information in the post-16 education system and the critical determinant is class. Kids at private school can rely on schools that have continual informal contact with elite universities. The result is that – for all the hard work being done by outreach teams in Russell Group universities, and by access teams in state schools – there’s an inbuilt advantage among those going to private schools based on informal knowledge.

Last year’s results for further maths demonstrate the problem. In English state schools, further education and sixth-form colleges, about 11,100 young people sat the exam; in the private sector, which accounts for just 7% of the school population, 3,600 sat it. And private school results were better, with 69% getting A or A* versus 54% in state schools.

Government tables show that this achievement gap is even more pronounced for ordinary maths and the three main science subjects. There are numerous private websites that offer A-level advice, and anecdotally social media are abuzz with the wisdom of teenage crowds over course and subject choices.

But why isn’t there a central repository of information that would turn all this folkore into a level playing field of checkable knowledge? Why isn’t there a single, open-source database that models all specific pathways into higher education? Without it, state school students will always find it hard to win the inside-knowledge game.

At my old university, Sheffield, they told me that you need maths and physics as part of three A grades to study aerospace engineering. That’s in line with the Russell Group’s guide, which also tells you to add design/technology, computer science or further maths.

The admissions tutor of an Oxbridge college, however, tells me: “I think here they’d be worried about no further maths, especially if it was offered at school but they didn’t take it, though I do worry that we send out mixed messages about this.”

The knowledge asymmetries deepen once you realise that elite universities require additional, bespoke tests. Cambridge University’s website reveals that if you want to do engineering at Christ’s, Peterhouse or St John’s you might need to take an extra exam called Step.

In a cantankerous, unsigned diatribe, the Step chief examiner for 2014 complains that only 3.8% of applicants scored top marks. The majority were not prepared for the kind of thinking they had to do. “Curve-sketching skills were weak,” the examiner noted, together with “an unwillingness to be imaginative and creative, allied with a lack of thoroughness and attention to detail”.

I will wager that the people who scored top marks knew that their curves had to look like Leonardo da Vinci’s and that they had to demonstrate imagination and creativity – because their teachers had long experience of this exam, and the others had not. One Oxbridge admissions tutor admitted to me that such testing may add a further barrier to people from state schools.

Suppose Matt wants to go to Oxbridge more than he wants to be an aerospace engineer? Here the advice is – for those in the know – really clear. Don’t apply for the most popular courses, where there can be 12 people for every place. Work out the college and subject combinations that reduce the odds to just three or four to one.

Oxford’s website shows the success ratio for getting on to its popular engineering and economic management course is just 10%, while the success rate of applications for materials science is 42%. A senior administrator at Oxford told me that they suspected few state school teachers really understand this game of playing the ratios. State-school students and people from ethnic minorities crowd each other out by going for the same, obvious, high-ratio and vocational courses.

Why should this matter to the majority of young people, who do not aspire to go to an elite university? And to the rest of society? First, because it is creating needless inequality of opportunity and is just the most obvious example of how poor access to informal knowledge penalises state school kids. Second, because in an economy set to be dominated by information and technology, those 15,000 people who can attempt further maths each year are the equivalent of Aztec gold for the conquistadores. Their intelligence will be the raw material of the third industrial revolution.

There is no reason – other than maintaining privilege – to avoid presenting subject and course choices clearly, logically and transparently. When the system fails bright kids from non-privileged backgrounds, we all lose.