I’ve been thinking about meritocracy, lately.
It’s extremely hard to separate out the inbuilt advantages of the financially and genetically lucky, in any society, and give everyone a level playing field.
But we should at least admit that some people start half-way to the finish line, if we think a meritocracy is worth striving for.
Because if we don’t acknowledge reality how can we fix anything?
And if you don’t think a meritocracy is worth striving for, let me show you want it’s like to grow up in a democratic country that is none-the-less extremely non-meritocratic.
Who Can Become Head of State in the UK?
- The monarch, who is born to another monarch, or related to them, or invited in by the powerful (sometimes the aristocracy, usually in parliament) to replace an ‘unsuitable’ monarch.
- No one who is not a member of the Church of England (even though the Church of England is NOT the established church in three of the four kingdoms of the UK. I, as a Catholic, could not marry into the succession without my spouse being required to remove themselves from the line of succession. By law.)
Who Can Be Come Prime Minister?
(‘Can’ and ‘does’ are different.)
Technically: Anyone who is a citizen can become Prime Minister.
Statistically: the Prime Minister is someone who attended one of three exclusive, English, boys-only private schools, and also went to Oxford, probably Christ Church College.
Let’s start with: What is the Prime Minister and Why Do They Matter?
The UK government is complicated. There is a monarch who is, technically, the head of state.
There is the prime minister, who is, technically, the head of government.
Between them, they wield the authority of ‘the crown’ — a nice legal fudge for the fact that we no longer wish to appear to think it’s a good idea to give any actual power to a person who inherited a title from his (mostly ‘his’) parents; but also we are reluctant to acknowledge that this was a silly system and we don’t like it any more. So, we have a monarch and a civilian leader. But also: we do quite like having a system that pulls our leaders from the same kind of mould (more on that in a minute).
The prime minister is the head of the government and the monarch is an entirely symbolic role.
The Prime Minister appoints the cabinet, drives policy, conducts foreign affairs, and generally is In Charge.
The Prime Minister, by tradition, comes from from the political party with the most seats in the House of Commons. Yes, the ‘Commons’. Because our other chamber of our government…that’s the unelected House of Lords.
<rolls eyes>
Many Prime Ministers have historically come from the House of Lords, the last one being Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel, who was a member of the House of Lords, an earl, and the Prime Minister from 1963-1964 (8 years before I was born).
And yes, they changed the rules a few years ago so that *most* of the seats in the House of Lords aren’t actually given to aristocrats who inherited their titles. Instead they are given to political appointees, (yay!) who *only* hold the seat for life, rather than being able to pass them on to their kids.
And also yes: the UK’s upper house is unelected. Some members are there through inheriting a title, most are there because they sucked up and were appointed by the Prime Minister (a member of parliament who was elected by a small number of people in single constituency in a first-past-the-post voting system that results in some spectacularly non-representative results that bear little resemblance to the ‘will of the people’–and then subsequently elected Prime Minister by a group of aligned-party peers who were similarly sent to parliament under a First-Past-The-Post voting system that…etc.)
Who Gets To Be Prime Minister?
Technically, anyone who is a citizen. Usually this is a Member of Parliament, specifically these days from the House of Commons.
But how ‘common’ are the men who become PM? (Yes, they are mostly men, though we’ve had three terrible female PMs, too.)
Of the 58 Prime Ministers in UK history, 55 were men, of whom 20 went to school at Eton, 7 to Harrow, 6 to Westminster “Colleges” (aka, private primary and secondary schools).
…OK, let’s cut to the chase: 11 out of those 58 did NOT go to fee-paying schools and I couldn’t find a single PM who went to a school that did not have some kind of entrance exam.
Almost 89% of the prime ministers went to fee-paying schools.
In the general population, less than 6% of people attend fee-paying schools.
Nobody who has been through the comprehensive system of education (i.e. non-selective, on academic or financial terms) has ever been Prime Minister.
So, you CAN become Prime Minister if your parents couldn’t afford to send you to one of the most prestigious, exclusive and expensive schools in the country…but you won’t.
(Most of the non-private school educated PMs served between 1964 and 1997, when we took a swerve back towards a preference for the rich, apparently. And those all attended selective-admission schools.)
Since 1900 I could only find 2 PMs who went to schools that were co-educational when they were there:
- David Lloyd George went to Llanystumdwy National School (which had separate entrances for boys and girls…)
- Gordon Brown, who went to Kirkcaldy High School in the 1960s, which did admit girls, but was also still operating under the selective system when he went there — if you can pass a test you get to go to the good school, if not, it’s off to the ‘lower school’ for you, with no path to University or higher education. (For the record, Brown is vigorously opposed to the kind of ‘hot-house’ educational pressure he experienced under this scheme. Good for Gordon!)
Which means 56 of the 58 UK Prime Ministers, if they weren’t privately educated at home (which in the early days, of course, a few were), spent most of their days, aged 7-18, in single-sex, exclusive environments, associating with people who shared their social class or so-called intellectual level.
Let’s Talk Higher Education
As established, 89% of Prime Ministers are privately educated, in contrast to 6% of the general UK population who can access this kind of education.
(Fiona Hill’s autobiography “Nothing Here For You” is a fascinating look at how hard it is to succeed in England if you’re not part of this system. My family moved back to Scotland when I was 10, and that country had, the year I was born, rejected the two-tier system that divide kids along two paths at the age of 10 or 11: one that is hard to access, but once you’re on it turns out to be a well-resourced, well-connected super-highway to success; and one, open to most people who weren’t genetically lucky, is a poorly-funded, over-subscribed, pot-hole-filled, traffic-choked dirt track with no route to higher education. Guess who succeeds?)
(I am proud to be Scottish, a people who take an jaundiced view of anyone who tries to tell you they’re better than you.)
Prime Ministers Mostly Go To Ancient Universities
An astounding 31 of our PMs attended Oxford University, 14 of them in the last 100 years, so don’t go thinking it’s just because Oxford has been for so long.
Other well-represented universities in the PM sweepstakes include Cambridge (14 PMs), Glasgow (3), and Edinburgh (3)
- 31.4% of Oxford students come from private schools
- 21.8% of Cambridge University students come from private schools
- 31.8% of students at the University of Edinburgh come from private schools (I went there, and that definitely feels accurate…)
- 13.2% of University of Glasgow students come from private schools.
(Remember roughly 6% of UK pupils are educated in private schools)
And My Point Is?
I could have picked any aspect of British life to illustrate how starting a 400m hurdle race at the 300m mark will always make it look like you’re the fastest, best, most impressive hurdler.
(I chose PM because it annoys me to no end, to think about how many of them are from such a rarified strata of society and yet the presume to know what’s best for the country/world as a whole.)
In reality, if you start some people on the 300m mark, and then point to them as the best qualified, what you get is ‘winners’ who don’t have to be the best.
You get ‘winners’ who traveled the shortest distance, didn’t have to strive as much as the people behind them (they might have, but they didn’t have to), who didn’t face as many hurdles, and who still get given the gold medal.
My Privilege
My parents did not go to college straight from school. My dad went into a civil service job that didn’t require it, and worked there for the rest of his career. My mum trained as a teacher when I went to school, something she was able to do largely thanks to a small bursary from the government that allowed her to buy a car so she could get to her tuition-free college, every day).
I did not pay tuition fees for college. My mum sent me a large part of her teaching salary for four years to pay for food and rent (there were no student loans yet, though the government had recently and suddenly ended students’ subsistence grants, something we had expected to be in place when I went to uni. When I eventually got a part-time job, my tutors disapproved.) Without my parents’ sacrifices there would have been no way for me to go to university. This meantg they were not saving that money for holidays, retirement, or upgrades to their house or cars, diminishing their long-term wealth potential.
My little family’s financial health improved disproportionately when we were left a partial share in a property we could sell. That gave us a financial cushion that freed us up to make other savings, along with improvements to our house that increased the value of our assets. It allowed us to pay off our cars, and trade them in for better cars when they got old, something that saved us money in the long run. My parents (and my husband’s parents) never had a windfall like this.
My husband developed a passion for a field that happens to pay well. If he had developed a passion for, say, sanitation work (a field his beleaguered English teacher told the smart-mouthed teenaged version of him that he would be ‘lucky’ to get into), we would not be as well-off though I’m sure he would work just as hard, if not harder, at that job, one that is at least as as important as the work he does now.
I am tall, strong, healthy, and therefore hard to intimidate. I haven’t suffered from any health issues (physical or mental),that have been more than minor inconveniences.
I grew up with tax-payer funded, free-at-the-point-of-service* doctor’s visits and all the immunisations a growing child could want (and some I didn’t. Wah!); access to optical care (free* if necessary, though my mother will point out I never had to wear the less-than-stylish free* NHS glasses because she paid for the fancy frames); free*, if slightly barbaric, dental care throughout my childhood–including braces to correct my ‘adorable’ overbite; free* transportation to and from school; reduced rates on public transportation throughout my childhood, which was abundant; music, art, craft and sports education at my (free*) school, none of which prepared me for a professional career in any of those fields, but which at least exposed me to them.
(*For ‘free’, read: tax-payer funded, free-at-the-point-of-service)
I was encouraged to read voraciously as a child, and regularly taken to (free*) public libraries that paid authors for their words, per-loan, from a central fund paid for by taxpayers.
I am white and, grew up somewhere on the lower end of the middle class scale, but close enough to my working class grandparents’ generation that I am not totally clueless.
And, although being a freckled redhead caught me some flack (yes, even in Scotland), and even though there was still systematic and social stigma against Catholics while I was growing up, and even though I was from that less-desirable half of humanity (female), I am aware of the many, many ways in which my obstacles were few. (Maybe I started on the 100m mark, not the 300m mark. But maybe it was the 200m mark.)
But I was still never going to meet or be allowed to marry a prince, and the road to being the head of government was, for me, an improbable one.
Worse that those barriers (oh, poor me, I didn’t get to be a princess of the head of government!) baked in to UK society, there is still a strong sense “that that’s not for people like us”—and for “that” you can insert any number of things: power, wealth, garden parties, skiing holidays, second homes, automatic respect, a sense that I’m as good as anyone else…
(And I didn’t even get into race….)
How is it good for the civic health of a country when the vast majority of people are holding themselves back from striving to reach their full potential because society repeatedly teaches them not to bother trying?
How does that make your country stronger or wealthier, or make the world a better place?
In short, and at long last:
You do not want to live in a society that tells some people they are inherently better than others.
It’s not cute.
It’s harmful and it permeates every aspect of civic life, stunting the growth and inherent humanity of every individual.
Do better.