Will the bureaucrats ever be held responsible? Don't hold your breath...
The UK now has a nomenklatura, every bit as privileged and unaccountable as that of the USSR. How has this happened?
From the scandal of the contaminated blood products, to the Post Office, to the grooming gangs, to the impact of the catastrophic lockdowns; from the disparity between corporate or public sector employment and self employment to a criminal justice system that appears to give criminals a free pass whilst crushing any law abiding citizen under tolls, fines, penalties, that gives a free pass to some but the full force of the law on others.
‘Privilege’ is a word that is bandied about these days, used to silence and attack others, often in a highly racist manner by those who should know better. ‘Privilege’ is usually presented as a strawman - a pastiche of Boris and Call Me Dave in top hats and monocles yelling ‘hawhaw’ like some latter day Lord Cardigans. Eton, Oxbridge, PPE, Tory Party etc.. This strawman had his time pre war, but was already dated then, since WW2 and the rise of the meritocracy, as outlined in Michael Young’s The Rise of the Metitocracy is now complete, the warnings Young made in that book are coming to fruition and anyone who thinks that power resides in the corridors of Eton is either remarkably naive or disingenuous. Young was a Labour Party activist, strategist and sociologist and he wrote this essay in 1958, it’s a shame that it wasn’t more widely read and with many who did read it, seems to have gone in one ear and out the other.
Young’s premise is that historically those who held power in Britain tended to respect those who did not. Britain avoided the bloody revolutions that wracked every other nation because its ruling classes reformed and relaxed their grip on power over several hundred years. 200 years ago, politicians and aristocrats looked across the channel at France and read the warning. 1848 was another critical turning point. The Black Death of the 1350s saw the emergence of the middle classes - the landowning squire peasant - hard on the heels came the Peasants Revolt, which was a revolt by those same classes. Since then we have had literally dozens of local and national revolts, many put down with brutality, but which also saw change rather than the continental solution: harsher tyranny. Young argues that by the time of universal suffrage 100 years ago, the ruling classes understood the importance of noblesse oblige because without it they understood that they would come to a sticky end like their continental cousins.
Young goes on to argue that this idea of noblesse oblige will be increasingly ignored by the new ruling class. He comments that as the meritocracy spreads, those who had advanced themselves through merit would, inevitably, have a degree of contempt for those they left behind. Far worse, Young argues, is that the children and grandchildren of those who had advanced through merit, who have no claim to that merit themselves, would treat the working class with both hatred and contempt fuelled by the guilt of their own privilege.
Take my family: my great grandfather, Ralph, was born into your typical highland family, his forefathers, after the Clan system, became gamekeepers, ghillies and gardeners. By the late 19th C they had moved to the industrial centre of Falkirk where Ralph’s father trained as a filemaker and eventually became a foreman in one of the Carron Valley’s specialist steelworks. Ralph followed him but, taking advantage of admirable educational initiatives at the time, was able to attend night school and then Glasgow University. By the time Ralph died at the young age of 55, he was Director of Education for Stirlingshire. Ralph had literally pulled himself up through merit and ability alone. His graft and ability elevated the family into middle class respectability whereas 150 years earlier three generations had been killed by a single whiff of grape, blown to bits with broadsword and targe in hand, charging with Clan Stewart at Culloden.
Ralph died in 1924, I was born in 1971, a member of the professional classes of Edinburgh, the son of a lawyer, raised in the establishment ‘Piscy’ church, in the drawing rooms of the New Town, Stew Mels and Fettes, you don’t get much more ‘Edinburgh Establishment’ than Charlie Strachan! Yet I didn’t earn my place in society, Ralph put the family up there, his ability, his graft, his merit.
Such a family history is typical of many of the modern ‘professional classes’. Some families have been more successful, some less, some ‘elevated’ earlier than Ralph, some have just done so. The point that Michael Young makes is that those of us who inherited our position in society through the merit of recent ancestors typically haven’t learned the importance of keeping the ladder in place for others nor the importance of respecting those who have not. That the guilt that they felt for this would increasingly manifest as either finger wagging patricianism or open contempt. He forecast that by the third decade of the 21st C (Young penned his work in the 1950s), the problem would be acute and society more divided by class than ever.
The only thing that Michael Young didn’t take into account was how social media would speed this up and, rather than expose people to others’ lives, increasingly isolate them from each other in confirmation bias bubbles. Not many would argue that our society has become increasingly divided and that this may be an existential threat to the concept of the nation state. David Goodhart identified the divisions in his book ‘The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics’ highlighting the ‘somewheres’ who were usually working class, valued local community, country and family and the ‘nowheres’ usually graduates, who see themselves as citizens of the world and who believe in globalism, internationalism etc. The Brexit debate flushed the division out into the open and also lifted the mask of contempt that many of the latter have for the former. Professor A.C. Grayling famously questioned whether the vote should be removed form some and in doing so revealed a fear of the mob, as old as Plato according to Guardian columnist Giles Fraser.
Fraser was, quite rightly, calling out elitism. Young went further and pointed out that by the 21st C the ‘meritocracy’ must learn the noblesse oblige of the old aristocracy or it would come to a sticky end. Yet, its six years since Giles penned that warning to the Guardian readers and sixty years since Young wrote his study and if anything it’s getting worse.
An astonishing example of this is to be found in the recent advert for a new Artistic Director at Camden Theatre: where, along with the usual requirements applicants from the following groups would be encouraged:
D/deaf and/or disabled
Nerodiverse
Working class, Benefit Class, criminal class and/or underclass
Global Majority and/or migrant
LGBTQ+
Now as some of you know, I have for my sins, worked in HR for many years and I can just picture the hand wringing ever-so-earnest meeting at which the wording of this advert was decided. It wouldn’t have occurred to them how patronising, insulting and elitist it is. Lumping ‘working class’ and ‘benefit class’ in with ‘criminal class’. It’s literally a Harry Enfield sketch.
Despite being challenged on this, the Theatre continues to run the advert, which demonstrates another issue with the meritocracy - they are always right and you are either misguided or too stupid to understand that you have been manipulated, but not to worry because they will educate you to ‘do better’.
Unfortunately this attitude is also that which is ultimately behind a managerial class that never, ever, accepts the responsibility or consequences of its actions. ‘Lessons will be learned’... yet they never are and those responsible for allowing the grooming gangs to rape children, those responsible for the Post Office Scandal and now the blood scandal are yet to see any personal consequences for their conduct and I would not hold your breath that they ever will.
The ‘meritocracy’, as described by Young is now a ‘nomenklatura’ in every respect bar party membership. And yes, again we refer to the Soviet Union. The nomenklatura were the ‘approved class’, usually party members who would be allocated the plum managerial and bureaucratic jobs. The only difference today is that ‘party membership’ doesn’t require a card, it merely requires you to agree to the political and ideological orthodoxies. This promotes groupthink in our institutions, destroys social mobility and. Like all ruling classes, it protects its members from consequences. It does all this whilst gaslighting the public that real power lies with ex Etonian ‘billionaire’ strawmen twiddling their monocles and adjusting their top hats.
We would do well to learn from history, we have created an unaccountable, increasingly powerful, self serving and ever growing bureaucracy. It is a symptom of a sick society that has lost its moral compass and we saw it in the Byzantine Empire, Tsarist Russia and Imperial China as well as in the Soviet Union.
The bureaucracy grows like a tumour, crushing and devouring those around it to feed its insatiable appetite until nothing is left: don’t believe me? Try running a small business in the UK these days.
If we are to fix this it will be essential to both increase social mobility through genuine opportunity, educational and commercial, to build the homes that allow people to own property and own a stake in our nation and to actively dismantle the bureaucracy that is strangling everything. It is time for the vast nomenklatura to be held accountable and to justify their existence. Sadly, with Mr Starmer in the wings, it looks like the opposite will happen and none of these things will happen because they directly threaten the individual interests of that class.