Toby Young has an article in this week's Spectator about how, toffs or not, Cameron and Osborne are really "meritocrats". I cannot see what merit has elevated Osborne, in particular. But there is a far more important point here.
The worst fate that can befall a satirist is to be taken entirely seriously. When Michael Young wrote The Rise of The Meritocracy, after having been warned that no good would come of a Latin-Greek hybrid word (television, homosexuality...?), his targets took him entirely seriously, and have been doing so ever since.
His dystopia was, and is, their utopia, in which those with material wealth and paper qualifications determine "merit" on the basis of material wealth and paper qualifications. Clearly, they include his son.
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We know you disagree with Toby Young, especially on schools' policy. But I think you are not quite fair to his article. It's fairly clear that the "meritocracy" that he describes is like the one his father describes, and that he has a low opinion of it.
ReplyDeleteAs I read it the point of the article is that the people he describes don't have the (possible) advantages of a noblesse oblige attitude.
I disagree with Toby Young's definition of conservatism, which he hints at at the end of the article. But his analysis is surely sound: there is a "lack of high Tory DNA"; paternalism is "a marketing strategy"; they don't enjoy the "rich and varied hinterland" of their establishment predecessors.