I know nothing about English Literature...except that Michael Rosen is wrong

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Our debate about English Literature has some certainties.. And one of these is that Michael Rosen (posh Marxist chap who wrote some children's books and got to be something called the "Children's Laureate") doesn't like Michael Gove. Plus, of course, the fact that Michael Rosen is wrong.

I say this as someone who finds the whole idea of anyone - whether neocon insurgent or faux-marxist establishment - deciding what is or isn't good literature both offensive and pointless. Yet Rosen is allowed space to say (in simple terms) that he knows better that some other chap - lacking, I assume, in his elist left-wing credentials - what young people should be reading. Indeed Rosen's latest criticism sums up the presumption - "Dear Mr Gove - you are too unexpert to determine young people's reading" (I'm not sure 'unexpert' is a proper word).

Wow! The scale of the arrogance of Michael Rosen! This scion of wealthy, middle-class Marxists is so prescient, so much a renaissance man as to know that Michael Gove (a man lacking Rosen's privileged education and background) is 'unexpert'. The wonderment of this is beyond parody - a bien pensant left-winger attacking someone as 'inexpert'. Brilliant!

Rosen launches into an ill-informed, partisan and barely literate attack on Gove. It is a joy to see this supposed champion of literary right-on-ness crash into the contradiction of his obsession. He makes a huge leap in his assumptions - as if the study of "fiction and drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards" is somehow the "Toryfication" of the English Literature GCSE! Look at that English writing - Thomas, Orwell, Wells, Waugh, Rushdie, Owen, Greene. These are all works that merely celebrate some Tory Reich!

Yet Rosen persists! To the point of simply pretending that 'British Isles' means something other than 'British Isles' (for what it's worth, I'm not sure I'd lumber any GCSE student with James Joyce but he clearly falls into the definition set out in the review). Our posh faux-marxist cannot conceive that what Gove is trying to do is get young people to appreciate something of our modern literary heritage.

Rosen is that worst sort of thing - an educated man with a bloody great bee in his bonnet. And the bee is that he doesn't like choice and liberalism in education. So, because he's sort of famous and the Guardian will pay him, he gets to make stuff up about changes to the English Literature GCSE and have them published in a national newspaper. Of course, Rosen is wrong but that won't stop a whole lot of folk sharing his ignorance simply because of their tribal distaste for a man who rather wants young people to read some modern English Literature.

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Michael Rosen, snob.

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He's feted by the left-wing bien pensants, quoted and tweeted and shared by all those people who like their thought processed and precooked. And he loves to pen polemics castigating those who don't share his bigoted, judgemental world view. But worst of all, Michael Rosen is a snob.

This will come as a shock to Michael. I'm guessing he feels his inherited socialism, steeped in the world of a Marxist educational mafia, means that he is connected to the ordinary bloke. But this, a typical piece of his prose (not a patch on his poetry), reveals the truth - Michael's a snob, a cultural snob:

Perhaps you're mad keen on culture. Perhaps in between making all that money you were hanging around galleries, theatres, cinemas, concert halls, comedy clubs, libraries, dance studios, painting classes. Perhaps you've seen how people manage on a shoe string, perhaps you've seen the awful conditions backstage in many theatres, perhaps you know about the crap wages most people in the arts work with. Perhaps you know about the terrible crisis we have in libraries, depriving people of access to knowledge and culture.

You see - the man he's writing about was busy 'making money' so wasn't able to consume any of that 'culture' that Michael is so keen on. Nasty, unappealing, noveau-riche money-grubbing mean you can't 'get' culture. Instead you should eschew all that for some sort of bohemian hair-shirt. Only then, in Michael's arrogant painting, will you qualify to speak of culture.

Like many from comfortable, middle-class origins, Michael Rosen is utterly dismissive of anything that looks like trade. There'll be lots of fine hand-wringing about how artists struggle and special pleading about The Arts. But the truth is that the business of culture that Michael holds out to us is a privileged, exclusive and incredibly snobbish world.  It's a world filled with judgement, with sneering and with a puffed up disdain for people who do the jobs that make it possible for us to fund what Michael calls "my sort of culture".

It's not Michael's ignorance that makes me despair (although he parades it in style every time his writes). We're all ignorant in our own way. Rather it's the way in which he assumes the superiority of his sort over the sort who work in banks. Yet everything Michael has, everything, comes from those bankers and businessman he loathes. The sense of entitlement, the demanding way in which Michael thrusts his collecting box under the noses of taxpayers, this is the truly shocking part.

Michael didn't write the hatchet job on Sajid Javid because he was a banker and a Tory. No he wrote the nasty little open letter because Sajid is a working-class lad made good. And that, in Michael's snobby little world makes him the worst sort of Tory banker.

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