Racism and the Politics of Privilege
Jake Wallis Simons, a Features writer for the Telegraph, is exercised by prejudice directed against Etonians. A photo-shopped picture of the UK Home Office’s controversial ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ publicity vans, with the new slogan ‘Fuck off back to Eton’. Simons felt the parody was ‘an expression of hatred and prejudice’ arguing this slogan had traction from ‘primal class hatred’.
Even if we temporarily put on hold the not-insignificant issues that ‘Go Home’ is a rather stronger expression of hatred, directed at much more vulnerable people than Etonians, from the UK government no-less, there is still a huge problem with this analysis. Simons may cry class hatred, but seems to miss the fact that class hatred is already being enacted on the British people at large, from upper echelons downwards. Eton isn’t the victim here, by a long way.
Moreover, we can’t put issues of race on hold, because a hijacking of the way the politics of class and race intersect is at the heart of the problem here. Elsewhere, James Bloodworth, repeating an argument by David Goodhart, writes of a trade-off between the welfare state and mass immigration. Solidarity, he suggests, operates in favour of people who are like us and there is less sympathy among white British toward those who are non-white. But this is precisely what begs the question; why is solidarity represented as naturally following from common racial identity and not from common class position?
The worry that it might possibly come from the latter, albeit as the resentment of a ‘squeezed middle’, is part of what motivates Simons. He writes that:
Our society, like every other in history, is unequal, and it is understandable that the have-nots will resent the haves… All too often it is not the have-nots who are fuelling this hatred, but the haves with a chip on their shoulder. Whichever way you look at it, discriminating against people because of where they went to school is wrong.
Where Simons is wrong is to suppose that the system is not already one of institutional discrimination against people on the basis of where they went to school.
Much of the debate on education policy has been about the problem of social mobility from poorer social backgrounds. The expansion of higher education has coincided with a transformation of the occupational order from a preponderance of manual jobs to a preponderance of white collar jobs. This has meant that relatively high rates of ‘structural mobility’ could be achieved, while the relative chances of someone from a poor social background achieving ‘service class’ occupation, have remained stable, despite the increase in participation rates in secondary and higher education.
In this context, the Government has sought to emphasise “fairness’’ and have criticised the ‘sharp elbows’ of the middle class that have denied equal opportunities to those below them – these are the ‘haves’ that Simons suggests have a ‘chip on their shoulder’. What is less noticed is the rise of a larger, more credentialed middle class which has threatened the privileges of the upper middle class in their access to service class jobs. At the same time, a study by Malcolm Brynin (pdf) suggests a narrowing of the gap between non-graduate and graduate pay.
What we are witnessing is a ‘fight back’ by the privileged conducted through various overhauls of the state to maintain and increase incomes for the wealthy and reduce their taxes while living conditions for the majority stagnate and benefits for the poor are cut. This fight back is orchestrated by newspapers like the Telegraph and it includes the overhaul of the education system to reinforce private secondary education.
In this context, the privatisation of universities, by charging premium fees, is aligning the higher education sector with the fee structure of private schools. Indeed, the British Social Attitudes Survey shows that, amongst those with graduate qualifications, support for the new university fee regime has risen to 30%, with just 19% supporting increased student numbers, while for those without formal qualifications, the numbers are 11% and 40% respectively.
At the same time, making GCSEs and A-levels harder, while emphasising the importance of selective universities, is reinforcing the hold of those with private education over the means of reproducing their privileges. Fees at private schools remain significantly higher than those at universities, and, of course, funding per pupil far outstrips state schools (where nowhere does it exceed £8,000 and for some local authorities is as low as £3,350 for some local authorities).
Compensating bursaries for university study have been introduced to support the aim of encouraging children from poor social backgrounds into higher education, just as they are argued, by some conservatives, for private education more generally. The real consequence, however, is to drive a wedge between the private school using upper middle class and that part of the middle class previously dependent on state education, and that is the intention.
Our country is not only unequal ‘like every other country in history’, it is also one of the most unequal countries in the world, in which the concern for equal opportunities expressed by politicians is spurious. Just as immigration policy now channels the language of racism from the 1960s, so education policy channels the system of ‘sponsored’ mobility through selection that was a feature of the same period, with its secondary moderns for the majority of working class children and grammar schools and private schools for the middle and upper class.
The concern, once again, is to secure the social mobility of the bright pupil from a working class background, while the place of the average pupil from privileged positions is maintained. At the same time, those unable to take advantage of higher education among those from disadvantaged backgrounds are condemned to their place in a system that delivers poor jobs and incomes (according to the UN Human Development Report for 2013 among the worst in Europe for the bottom 20%.
It is clear that the vans and the action of UKBA border police in stopping visible minorities to check their immigration status reflect Government concerns about the politics of migration in the context of competition from UKIP. ‘Anxieties’ about immigration and its supposed consequences for the labour market may sustain the Government, but it is the anxieties of those above them that is driving its policies. Their aim is to restore the competitive advantage of the upper middle class within the professional labour market which all previous education reforms since the1960s had sought to redress.
Simons might cry class hatred. He’s starting from the wrong place. The British population, in fact, is being subject to class warfare on behalf of the privileged who reject politics conducted in the name of an inclusive public interest. An inclusive public interest in the reduction of inequality – class solidarity - is also a key way out of, not justification for, the rise of racism and the scapegoating of migrants as the cause of declining social conditions.
John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University.
A letter has been published in The Guardian protesting against the Home Office's hostile actions against migrants. You can also sign this petition if you agree.
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