This is a perfectly good book, which should never have been written.
I say this not as any kind of criticism of its authors, who have produced a clear and rigorous work, but as a comment on the maze of intellectual shortcuts and cul-de-sacs in which public debate on almost any subject has now become trapped in this country. How on earth can it be necessary to take 300 tightly-argued and well-researched pages to prove that Britain remains a society divided by class, when the evidence is as clear as a mountain range? The answer is that we have become hugely vulnerable to stupidity.
Messrs Major and Lamont, for example, smuggled themselves into Downing Street under a convenient cloak of 100% tosh about the classless society. The cloak was transparent. We all saw it. But crowds of journalists and pundits pretended it was real. Because they are idle, because their masters are venal, because their readers have almost entirely lost the power of critical thought and wander around bleating their willingness to be herded from one fashionable nonsense to another. So it becomes necessary to prove the obvious.
Against the background of this immense jabber, it is finally a delight to hear Adonis and Pollard, whose voice is clear and whose message is sane and well-supported. From the outset, they acknowledge they are undertaking a job which should be unnecessary. “Class divisions are intensifying as the distance between the top and bottom widens and the classes at both extremes grow in size and identity. This should be obvious to all. Indeed, we contend it is obvious to almost all in today’s Britain – except, crucially for much of the nation’s elite which for reasons of fear and self-interest is struggling to eliminate class from the realm of respectable debate.”
They are sharp in their analysis. I liked their point that it is no answer to a class-ridden society to say that there are ladders of opportunity which enable the ambitious to move upwards: “The condition of classes is far more important than the mobility between them. Minorities are on the ladder; majorities stay put.” They are thorough in their research, trawling through an ocean of statistics and learned research to produce, for example, detailed evidence of the gross inequalities in our education system: all but 22 of the top 200 schools in the A-level league table are private; half of all Oxbridge entrants come from private schools which account for only 7% of the classroom population; a fifth of eleven-year-olds in private school are four years ahead of the expected standard for their age, while four fifths of the eleven-year-olds in an Islington primary school could not pass a basic reading test. (Some of this stuff makes you want to hit someone.)
They pursue the trail of evidence through the background of MPs, pulling apart the apparently valid claim that they are all now middle class to uncover the clear division between the private sector education and employment history of the Tories compared to the public sector context of the Labour members. They find more evidence in health and housing and they are particularly strong on what they call the ‘Super Class’, the new private sector elite of City dealers, QCs and company directors with huge salaries and diminutive consciences, exemplified by Cedric Brown of British Gas and Nick Leeson of Barings, whose stories they unfold. The evidence of class distinction is, indeed, mountainous.
If I have a reservation, it is that their approach is academic, concerned almost entirely with statistics and analysis, with little or no original ‘human’ research. This is not simply a matter of style or tone. There are aspects of class division which reveal themselves only through the stories of individuals. I am thinking in particular of the emotional, social and even spiritual damage which is inflicted on those who live in poverty. But that, too, for anyone who is not yet lost in the idiot maze, ought to be pretty obvious.
* Nick Davies is the author of Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain, published by Chatto and Windus, price £16.99.
