Polly Toynbee: Basically Right This Time

The debate rages on over Polly Toynbee and her latest book, Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today, with its attacks on the super-rich and its criticisms of Oxbridge.

Regular readers of the Guardian's letters page will know that that paper's readership contains a strong strain of Toynbeescepticism, especially on the day after any of her starstruck and girly paens, first to Blair, then to Brown, and now to Miliband. They speak for me.

But this time, she is basically right.

Enormous importance is attached, by all parties, to those who think that their own sector is vastly more important than it really is (even now, the whole of the financial services sector, never mind the City alone, still accounts for less than half the GDP that manufacturing does), who are convinced that one hundred grand per year (one per cent of the population) is not rich at all, who sincerely imagine national median earnings to be poverty pay, who have managed to put about the complete fantasy that they are members of a super-adaptable global elite (in fact, they ordinarily work for the same company for decades on end, and live very settled lives indeed), who have no idea how their taxes are spent but are nevertheless convinced that every penny must be being wasted, who simply assume that nobody in the public sector is properly qualified (doctors?), and so many other things exposed in this book.

As for Oxbridge, who cares? Last year, Eton sent 95 people to Oxbridge. An Oxbridge degree just means that you are the ninety-fifth best Etonian in his year, or that person's equivalent. So what? How good can the ninety-fifth best Etonian in his year possibly be?

I'm all for bringing back grammar schools, but I'm also all for getting over Oxbridge.

And I don't know why anyone thinks that Toynbee would object to a Cameron Government. On what grounds? It wouldn't do anything of which she disapproved. Or, at least, nothing more than Blair did, or than Brown is doing, or than Miliband would do.