johnny9fingers | Gods almighty….

This is the month that I turn fifty. I'm almost as old as 'Private Eye'. Born during the post-War, post-Suez, you've-never-had-it-so-good Macmillan administration, and I suppose I've never really lost the mindset that accompanies it.

In comparison to the stuff going on a decade-and-a-half before I was born, I was made fully aware of the fact that we'd never had it so good: whatever unknown variable "it" was, and for a given value of good, of course.

When I was born, a chap could go from a barely literate council-house background, via a state Grammar School, to Oxbridge and then on to high office.* And be fit for that office too. (For the purposes of this musing, please assume that the word "chaps" can apply to either/any gender and/or any orientation.)

It is less so, these days: as over the past thirty years true social mobility has become more and more difficult. It is true we aren't as rude to the great unwashed as we were of yore: we don't bray at 'em and sneer because they don't know which knife and fork to use, or alternatively use words like 'toilet' instead of lavatory or loo. The previous languages of entitlement are now regarded, quite rightly, as vulgar and divisive: and yet the more egalitarian Oxbridge of the sixties and seventies, that used to be composed of (and whose respective differences gentled each other) extremely clever Grammar School chaps, and those members of the upper classes that had the desire to apply themselves, and the relevant equipment to apply, is now gone; and is replaced by chaps trying hard to catch up because the state schools they attended left them at an intellectual disadvantage in comparison to the private school educated chaps.

In this, the world has turned on its head. We no longer promote merit and excellence as much as we promote the merit and excellence of the upper classes. In which case I'd recommend that everyone becomes upper class now, as soon as possible, which is clearly impossible.

Being of the upper classes is like being part of a self-perpetuating mediæval guild. And as the guilds stagnated, so will the upper classes unless they have a real mechanism for renewal, rather than merely being wage-labour farmers and our society's husbandmen of work.

*Now, alas, that's not me: would that I had the abilities and drive to have been able to overcome such difficulties, having had the initial misfortune of being dealt such cards. As is, I was dealt a pretty damn good hand as it happens, and even then I managed to overbid myself once or twice.