James Bloodworth - The Myth of Meritocracy

T URNING BRITAIN INTO a meritocracy is a modern political obsession. Seldom do todays politicians talk about reducing economic inequality; instead they prefer to ruminate on aspiration, viewing it as their job to ensure that the most talented people rise to the top and reap the financial rewards in the process. When the late Michael Young, author of Labours portentous 1945 election manifesto and inspiration behind the Open University, coined the word meritocracy back in 1958, it was intended as a warning. Youngs fictional essay The Rise of the Meritocracy had imagined a Britain of the future in which a meritocratic elite had replaced the old aristocratic order. British society had hitherto condemned even talented people to manual work. Youngs imagined utopia had upended all of that and anointed a new elite that was no longer an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent whose superior IQs were revealed through a process of rigorous examination.

Yet, rather than ushering in a harmonious new order of brotherhood and fraternity, equality of opportunity in Youngs utopia meant equality of opportunity to be unequal. The supposed cranial superiority of the new elite was used by the new order to justify the gulf between it and wider society. In a grimly familiar twist, utopia bore a strong resemblance to dystopia, and the impetus to look after those wretched folk who languished at the bottom of society had evaporated like steam from a kettle. As for the supposed self-made men who sat atop this new meritocratic pile, all rich men in the new society had earned their fortune and were thus permitted to enjoy the extravagant rewards as they saw fit. No need to worry about charity for the destitute. The poor were ragged and wretched because their lowly IQs had made them that way. They had forfeited the right to look on resentfully at those above them the moment they had failed the 11-plus. The old aristocratic order which the new society had finally swept away had evoked the spurious concept of good breeding to justify its position and influence. With its passing, a new and meritorious elite had come to power; and this one rationalised its dominance on the basis of rigorous and scientific IQ testing.

The Rise of the Meritocracy was, as Young would later write, a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between the year 1958 and the imagined final revolt against meritocracy in 2003.

In few places has the goal of meritocracy been adopted with quite the same vigour as in the upper echelons of the modern Conservative Party. Prime Minister David Cameron says he wants to see

a more socially mobile Britain where no matter where you come from you can get to the top in television, you can get to the top in the judiciary, get to the top of the armed services, get to the top in politics and get to the top in newspapers.

Cameron made the same point more succinctly in 2013 when he stated that I believe in equality of The culmination of this rhetoric was a cross-departmental strategy published in 2011 with the central claim that improving social mobility is the principal goal of the governments social policy.

The Labour Party has also seemingly accepted the desirability of a meritocracy, with former leader Ed Miliband telling the Sutton Trust conference in 2012 that social mobility must not be just about changing the odds that young people from poor backgrounds will make it to university we also have to improve opportunities for everyone, including those who dont go to university.

Like universal suffrage and world peace, every politician in modern Britain purports to be in favour of meritocracy.

For most of Britains history, young people have grown up with a keen sense of their station in life. Historically, Britain has been a country with a rigid class system, where education was a luxury afforded only to a small minority. Until the late nineteenth century, children of the rich and powerful attended exclusive public and grammar schools, while churches and charity schools provided a rudimentary education for the lower classes. In practice this meant that the lives of talented working-class people were often wasted in ignorance and drudgery.

Things only really began to change (and even then very slowly) with the passage of the 1870 Education Act, the first piece of legislation committed to providing education on a national scale. The policy was driven by Liberal MP William Forster and enacted at a time when the political establishment in Britain was beginning to grasp the frivolity of consigning intelligent children to penury and toil. However, the new law was not introduced as an act of generosity; rather, it was thought that by fully exploiting the talents of the many rather than the few Britain would better be able to compete with its emerging economic rivals.

The initial passage of the act was far from smooth. While mainstream Conservatives would eventually come to recognise the benefits of education in terms of keeping Britain economically competitive, many initially worried that educating the poor would lead them off the straight

Even among those seeking reform, educating the poor was typically framed in terms of how it would benefit capitalists, rather than how it might improve the lot of workers. Introducing his own policy, William Forster warned that if the British workforce remained unskilled, they will become overmatched in the competition of the world. favour of educating the poor. For proponents of the free market, nepotism and Britains rigid social order were impediments to an efficient economy. The best jobs invariably went not to those in possession of the most brilliant minds but to the well-connected or to the progeny of the wealthiest families. The problem for free marketeers wasnt so much inequity as inefficiency. However talented they might be, nepotism discouraged those placed lower in society from ever attempting anything that smacked of aspiration.

Conservative politicians and thinkers would eventually reconcile themselves to the views of MPs like William Forster, at least in terms of educating the poor. No Tory MP would dare to stand up in the House of Commons today and claim that the poor should be denied education lest it make them difficult. Recent Conservative governments have appeared (on the surface, at least) to take social mobility just as seriously as their political rivals in the Labour Party. Ramsay Muir, a journalist and leading member of the post-war Liberal Party, summed up this interpretation of the meritocratic ideal well when he said that the state should not establish

Contrary to theories purporting to show an unbreakable affiliation between the Conservative Party and the aristocratic establishment, the