Book Review #5

When I wrote (yet another) post against identity politics – Wealth Not Identity – I made reference to the superb sitcom ‘The Young Ones’ and in particular, the episode Bambi. In that episode, Alexei Sayle delivered the following rant…

 

“…I never really wanted to be a train driver, you know. I mean, they told me when I left school, if I got two CSEs, I’d be head of British Steel. That’s a load of nonsense, isn’t it? You look at the statistics, right? 83% of top British management have been to a public school and Oxbridge; 93% of the BBC have been to a public school and Oxbridge; 98% of the KGB have been to a public school and Oxbridge. All you get from a public school is one, a top job and two, an interest in perverse sexual practices…”

 

I highly recommend you read Robert Verkaik’s book Posh Boys: How The English Public Schools Ruin Britain.

If you go back through my posts, you will find two key points I have been making about politics in the West since I started this blog in January 2017. The first point is my anger at the incredible, indefensible and growing wealth inequality in Western societies; a few ultra-rich individuals have cornered virtually all of the increase in wealth since those self-same individuals (deliberately?) crashed the world economy back in 2008 and then demanded that governments rescue them from the consequences of their own arrogance and hubris. The second point is that ostensibly left-wing political parties in the West have done nothing about this increasing inequality because they have been colonised by wealthy pseudo-leftists who are doing very nicely out of the current economic arrangements. In place of the traditional concerns of left-wing parties, these people have substituted the divisive, poisonous, reactionary and quite possibly racist ideology of identity politics. As I have commented before, it is fine to care passionately about the toileting arrangements of transgender battery hens if Daddy’s credit card is available for such incidentals as the rent.

 

Robert Verkaik’s book is an angry polemic against the influence of a small group of people educated at Britain’s (and especially England’s) public schools. Despite only educating 7% of the UK population, ex-public school pupils account for 74% of senior judges, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces, 67% of Oscar winners, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 50% of cabinet ministers and 33% of MPs. The media is just as bad – 43% of newspaper columnists are public school educated as well.

 

And it’s not just the Conservatives who are dominated by the products of public schools. Seamus Milne, late of the Guardian and Jeremy Corbyn’s chief puppet master, was educated at Winchester College and Oxford (Corbyn himself also went to public school). John McDonnell, Corbyn’s Mao and Marx-loving Shadow Chancellor, went to public school whilst comedy racist Diane Abbott sent her son to public school whilst denying the same chance to her own constituents. The identity politics racists at Jimmy Savile House and Guardian Towers are almost all public school and Oxbridge graduates; no wonder they are obsessed with Palestine, ‘gender’ issues and ‘third wave’ feminism rather than the hospital waiting lists, overcrowded schools and crumbling transport infrastructure that are the key concerns of  ordinary voters.

 

All this would not matter if the public school ‘elite’ that rules us were actually any good at the jobs they have cornered. But the Establishment is as incompetent as it is arrogant. The past two years has seen British politics paralysed over membership of an organisation that sees 95% of the benefits of said membership accrue to 5% of the population. The Brexit debacle is a civil war within the Establishment; the neoliberal Remainers think they can make money by staying in, the neoliberal Leavers by getting out. Like the arguments about the aforementioned transgender battery hens, very little to do with the EU directly benefits or harms the lives of ordinary voters.

 

If anyone says I have a chip on my shoulder about this issue, I would respond ‘yes, I certainly do.’ Whilst I did not attend Oxford or Cambridge, I saw enough of the products of public school at university to give me a lifelong antipathy to their attitudes. The rugger buggers – with their boorish sexism and homoerotic initiation rituals – were particularly irritating, although the public school Marxists gave them a run for their money. I think I’ve said before that my girlfriend at university, who probably could have been head of the students’ union if she had chosen to stand, was abused by one of these overprivileged imbeciles for being ‘too middle class’; this was despite her being the daughter of a postman and a housewife. My attitudes hadn’t mellowed thirteen years after graduating when I gave my Australian wife an introduction to the British class system when I was extremely irritated by the braying of a gaggle of public schools boys at a hostel in Nuremburg. Why do these people have to be so loud?

 

The entire public school system and the entitlement it breeds cannot be improved – it must be abolished. The whole of the UK Establishment needs to be swept away in a root-and-branch reform like in 1649 Britain, 1789 France or 1960s China.

 

I thoroughly recommend Verkaik’s book. My only criticism is with the decision to put a quote from Afua Hirsch on the front cover. Hirsch is one of the most unpleasant people in the British media today. Being a product of immense privilege – wealthy family, public school, Oxbridge and the Inns of Court – she can find little to nothing positive to say about her fellow citizens and her columns in the Guardian (where else?) drip with arrogance and condescension. Hirsch is exactly the kind of overpromoted and overprivileged, public school Establishment-shill that Verkaik spent his entire book criticising.