NARRATIVES AND VALUES: Young and old meritocracy: from radical critique to neoliberal tool.
| Author | Littler, Jo |
Since the 1970s a neoliberal form of meritocracy has become the basic common sense of British society. But it needs challenging, for all this meritocratic system does is justify hierarchies and vast inequalities, and marketise more and more of life. A socialist alternative should value diversity and democracy, and, above all, tackle economic inequality.
In January 2018, Toby Young stepped down from the board of the new Office for Students (OFS), the government's new regulatory body for higher education in England. This occurred after a widespread public outcry at his appointment, including an online petition calling for his removal with more than 200,000 signatures. Young's support for eugenics, his continual tweeting about 'tits' (including those of female MPs and fourteen-year old girls), his disparagement of wheelchair access ramps and his condemnation of state school pupils as 'stains' was the kind of humour whose sense of infantile superiority appealed to a particular type of public schoolboy and The Spectator, but was offensive to most--primarily because it essentially functioned by disparaging absolutely everyone beyond it; everyone apart from wealthy white public schoolboys. There were few groups Young had not offended, which made it harder for the right to defend his position, (although Theresa May and Kirstie Allsopp tried).
A Tory pundit and a chum of Jo and Boris Johnson, Young has been a key activator of the privatised 'free' school agenda and, since 2017, has been Chief Operating Officer of the New Schools Network, an organisation given large amounts of money by the government to establish schools outside of local authority control. His appointment to the OFS, like the constitution of the OFS itself, has been accurately read by some commentators as not simply another attempt to extend the structures of privatisation (although of course it was), but as an ideological intervention attempting to ignite a 'culture war' within universities--to drag them towards the right by challenging the politics of speakers and lecturers at a time when young people are more left wing than they have been for generations. (1) Though the OFS and the May government continue, Young's sacking has been an energising minor victory against the Tories' misogynistic right-wing populism and Trump-lite politics.
A sizeable amount of the media coverage of the Toby Young debacle mentioned his father Michael Young, the sociologist and inventive social entrepreneur who co-founded the Open University and the Consumer's Association, and respected Labour grandee who penned the 1945 Labour Party manifesto. Media profiles on the OFS affair frequently highlighted Toby Young's desire and inability to live up to his father's flamboyant reputation, and the political differences between Youngs senior and junior. (2) In particular, many pieces foregrounded the connections and differences between Toby and Michael on one specific subject: meritocracy.
'Meritocracy' today is generally understood to involve the idea that a fair social system is one in which people can work hard, activate their talent and achieve social success. This credo has come to be 'common sense' within modern society. There is more-than-ample evidence, primarily through his own journalistic and social media output, that Toby Young believes that dramatic levels of inequality--the opposite of 'a level playing field'--are justifiable (he has often gone on record defending the aristocracy). It is also well known, to those with enough of the relevant cultural capital, that Michael Young's 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy critiqued the concept. The book was a satire, with the first half documenting the expansion of democracy in Britain, and the second imagining a sci-fi dystopia featuring a black market trade in brainy babies. The New Republic columnist Jeet Heer tweeted on 1 January: 'Michael Young was the great theorist of meritocracy. Toby Young is the living refutation of meritocracy'.
Toby Young's vested interests in the perpetuation of an elite, including himself, were eventually too graphic and too difficult to refute. Yet prior to his departure, vigorous attempts were made by the right to present him--just as the OFS is being presented to the public more generally--as a conduit of exactly the 'fair' social mobility that meritocracy has in recent decades been understood as involving. Even a critical piece in the Independent which suggested that Toby reaped what he sowed on social media presented him as an advocate for 'social mobility' and 'fair access', as a:
[..] high profile champion of the government's Free Schools programme, who believes in social mobility and the provision of (slight traditional) standards of excellence. The new board [the OFS] exists to regulate and "uphold standards at universities" and to promote fair access to higher education, as well as safeguarding the right to free speech on campuses and preventing radicalisation. (3) The entire incident is very revealing. It indicates how the ideology of meritocracy is put to work by the right and used by a plutocracy to try to extend its power, and what it might take to challenge it. Michael and Toby Young's different...
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