Ordinary people don't exist

The Guardian is doing its bit to stoke up class envy. Last week Peter Wilby wrote an absurd article about David Cameron, cannabis and the now infamous Bullingdon Club photo.

Roy Hattersley has returned to the theme:

That does not mean last week's tittle-tattle left Cameron unscathed. He suffered what the Pentagon would call collateral damage. His problem was not the pot, but the picture... The question it provokes is obvious. "Understands ordinary people?"

I don't doubt that some voters will be turned off pictures of sneering toffs (though, let's remember, the Bullingdon Twelve were posing for a photo and - my God, perhaps, playing up to the camera knowing that much of Oxford thought they were tossers), but my question is who are these "ordinary people" that need understanding?

I consider myself to be from a pretty typical background (lower middle-class, suburban) but then I went to Cambridge, where I met lots of privately-educated people, and then to work in newspapers, where I met even more. I'm sure that their attitudes - because we all know posh people have exactly the same views - have rubbed off on me: so does that now disqualify me from understanding "ordinary people". Heck, I'm a top-rate taxpayer, so does that disqualify me too? Also, I'm a childless gay so that must remove me even further from the concerns of ordinary people... so perhaps we shouldn't have gay MPs.

Now, what about the children of immigrants from, let's say, Bangladesh. Their family life, their experiences and the values that they are taught  are quite different from their white neighbours. Do they count as "ordinary people"? Can they understand the concerns of the white majority? And what about a steelworker from South Wales - his life is pretty different from a retail worker from Crawley? A council-house tenant doesn't have to worry about mortgages, so he doesn't know much about the woes that face homeowners. And... you get the picture. The "ordinary voter" is a pretty rare thing.

The class baiting of David Cameron is plain dumb. It presupposes that we are all prisoners of our background, incapable and unwilling of making the imaginative leap and learning about other peoples' lives. After all Roy Hattersley and Norman Tebbit are of a similar vintage, both grammar school boys from unprivileged backgrounds, and both with a good schtick about speaking-up for ordinary people - so how come they have radically divergent views?

That's not to say that Britain doesn't have a class problem. I can chunter with the best of them about the nepotism and cronyism. It's just that a few rich Tory kids at the Bullingdon aren't the issue (sorry Clive Davis). The real damage to meritocracy and social mobility is the shambolic state of Britain's education system. Fewer children from the state sector go to Oxbridge now - Oxford and Cambridge have been brilliant institutions for giving a leg-up to people from humble backgrounds - than they did in the Sixties. And why did that happen? The abolition of grammar schools in favour of Roy Hattersley's beloved comprehensives.   

Robbie Millen

Comments

[ade]

Cameron is a likeable chap, a posterboy for personable British politics. The only problem is - we've seen it before with Blair. I have no doubt he'll get in office, and then the cracks will begin to appear and scandal after dossier after fuel revolt will seep through. With eyes open, hand-gesturing and dynamic speech they attempt to communicate with the young voter and reignite the pulses of the older, yet we're left asking - how on earth can an Oxbridge graduate on fifty to a hundred thousand a year possibly relate to the rest of us? If politicans stopped TRYING to relate to "normal" people, and just came clean with a drug-story or two, I'm sure a great proportion of us would feel more inclined to throw a vote their way.

[Clive Davis]

Robbie,
Of course the failure of the state system is a huge factor. If I'd been writing a book rather than a short blogpost, I might have touched on that. Still, I don't happen to think Wilby or Hattersley's pieces are about class envy. They're talking about the obnoxious behaviour of a privileged and rather boring set of people who - surprise, surprise - went on to enjoy a privileged position in our society. It's just not possible to avoid dragging class into the issue. As you know, Libby Purves wrote a great piece about the Bullingdon mentality a while ago.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article413751.ece
As she used to edit Tatler, I assume she doesn't suffer from an inferiority complex. As I've said before on my blog, it seems to be impossible to discuss the narrow and claustrophobic make-up of London's media and political elite without sounding resentful. I'm not. I just find it curious that we're all supposed to pretend it's all part of a natural, time-honoured process.

[adam]

Did some mention crappy state education? I've been chasing my hobby horse all over the internerd, these last few days.

You can have good comprehensives, to be sure, but introducing them hasn't, I don't think, solved the problems that were there in the old grammar school system. There are a bunch of things I'd like to see but major ones are:

Setting (which many schools already use) with smaller average class sizes.

Break the payscale altogether; in particular, if you have to pay physics and maths teachers twice as much as an English teacher to get the same quality of teacher, pay it.

Appoint me King of the World.

Bring back GM schools (not a magic bullet by any means, but if a school doesn't want to accept the LEA's priorities, then they're best-suited to judge their own needs).

[Peter Nolan]

Robbie, a chara,

Not having been to Oxford, I'd wonder if anybody would give a damn about these. However, I'd be a bit concerned that Christina Odone, who did says that the club was "exclusive - no grammar school or state school boys, no Jews were allowed (though a rather dashing Iranian did squeak through the election process in my time)."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/02/13/do1304.xml

I presume that the Iranian was the fraudster Darius Guppy, who is about the right age, but were no Jews allowed? Shouldn't that be worthy of comment in 21st century Britain?

[Judy]

I think the most interesting thing about all this is the fact that David Cameron and Boris must have been party to knowingly participating in serious criminal damage and in bribing people to avoid it being reported to the police. Hmmm, cannabis plus criminal damage.... no wonder he had a period of hug-a-hoodie PR.

[adam]

Frankly, I am appalled at the idea that students might commit criminal damage. It is for reasons such as this that we must Bring Back the Birch.

[linda]

here's a question for Bullingdon Dave: how do you think it feels for a state school kid to arrive at their Oxbridge college to find out that their college-mates only want to be friends with their old public-school chums?

[John Burgoyne]

Here's another question for Bullingdon Dave. How do you think it feels for a state school kid to arrive at their Oxbridge college only to be jeered at, debagged and ritually humiliated by the public school educated elite? Is that supposed to instill a sense of 'esprit de corps' and patriotic pride in the 'ordinary plebeian'?