Are there too many posh people in politics? And, if so, what should we do about it?

Chris Dillow, in a slightly chip-on-his-shoulder manner, writes how "posh people" should be disqualified from politics. Chris cites lack of hustle, overconfidence, a casual attitude to money and the lack of a "gut understanding" of how other people live. There's nothing new about the analysis presented - people who've had a struggle to escape from poverty very often resent the effortlessness with which posh people slide into grand roles.

There are, however, some thoughts arising from this that strike me as important:

1. By creating two categories, rich and poor, Chris ignores the reality which is that most people are neither. An interesting experiment here would be to contrast the manner in which 'middle class' is understood in the USA and the way in which 'middle class' is presented very often in the UK. I'm middle class (my Dad was an insurance clerk in the City for all his working life) but my experience bears little or no resemblance to the typical middle class life described in the Sunday supplements with its foreign holidays, private schools, nannies and endless dinner party angst.

2. Empathy is really important in politics - perhaps as important as what we could call "lived experience". One of the features of modern political discourse, with its emphasis on economics and obsession with evidence, is that it loses feeling. Everything is boiled down to a narrow utilitarian analysis with no room for "gut understanding". People parade class credentials (or attack others for their excess of privilege) without appreciating that this is simply adopting a badge not being empathetic, let alone understanding, of other people's lives. I may be the grandson of a miner but that doesn't make me working class - just a little bit closer to understanding that class than someone who is the grandson of an earl.

3. Policy-making is dominated by the well-off. Chris points to some very privileged people - Jacob Ree-Mogg, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray - to make his point about how posh folk are a problem. But there's a much bigger group of people, not all the product of elite private schools, but still unquestionably wealthy and privileged. The influence of these people (they litter the media, civil service, think tanks and charity administration as well as politics) leads to tin-eared policy-making such as the persistent attacks on working- and lower middle-class lifestyle choices.

4. Generally-speaking the private sector is far more egalitarian than the public sector. I recall the then chief executive of Reed Elsevier telling a tale of how, for the annual report, his PR team were very proudly saying "all our senior management are graduates" - he had to point out to them this wasn't true as he wasn't a graduate. Employment in the city has always been a strange mish-mash between barrow boys and public school grandees (not least because trading requires that ability to hustle, negotiate or strategise that Chris points out is often missing in posh folk).

5. There are too few what I would call "ordinary people" in politics these days. From 1965 to 2005 the Conservative Party was led by people from ordinary backgrounds (Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague, Duncan Smith, Howard) - all bar one from what us Londoners call the 'provinces'. That politics is now - in every part of its spectrum - completely dominated by folk from less ordinary backgrounds is a failing in what should be an egalitarian pastime.

We give a great deal of attention (rightly in the main) to getting better representation from women and ethnic minorities but much less attention to whether the interests and outlook of the people we chose, gender and race aside, reflect the interests and outlook of most people, especially outside London and the Home Counties. Indeed, there's a tendency to look down the nose as MPs like Phil Davies ("he used to work in ASDA, you know") or Ben Bradley ("shelf stacker in Lidl") rather than see this experience as providing a fighting chance of actually understanding what it's like for the customers and employees of value supermarkets.

I don't think the posh should be disqualified from politics, people like Tony Benn and Willie Whitelaw made major contributions to politics, but I do consider that Chris Dillow has a point - political parties need to think harder how they can get people who better represent the electorate. I think the Conservative Party has done some good work here but it is still the case that the centralised candidate approval system makes it too easy for London-based people with good connections to get approved and onto shortlists for winnable seats.

Perhaps we need also to look at non-graduate routes into professions - my uncle was a county court judge when he died but started his career as a 14-year old post boy in a solicitors' office (another uncle started at Barclay's as a sixteen-year old and finished as a senior tax accountant at the bank). These days too many jobs are closed off to non-graduates - the latest here is nursing which has gone the route of social work and policing in this regard - which makes it pretty tough for the 50% of kids who don't go to university.

Lastly, we need to ask whether the domination of London and the process of sortition by wealth (largely driven by housing costs) contributes to the manner in which well-off people simply don't have a clue about the real lives of most ordinary people - not just the poor but millions of people who are what the Americans would call 'middle class'.

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So why all the fuss then?

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I would like it scrapped - inheritance tax, that is - but despite this the "it's a tax on aspiration" or "attack on the middle class" arguments appear not to hold much water:

Of the roughly 560,000 deaths in 2009-10, inheritance tax was paid on the estates of just 14,600 — or 2.6 per cent.

And tax was paid on just 4,700 estates worth between £325,000 and £500,000 — each of which paid about £27,000 on average. In fact, 68 per cent of inheritance tax receipts came from estates worth £1 million or more.

The 14,600 estates that did pay inheritance tax were, on average, worth £875,000 (including £329,000 in residential property, £253,000 in securities and £190,000 in cash) and paid, on average, £163,000 — an effective tax rate of just under 19 per cent.

Why make it a big deal?

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"I don't approve of you drinking" - Cameron's message to the English

The softening up process - the drip drip of judgemental leakage that typifies Cameronism - continues as we're warned about the new "Alcohol Strategy":

The plans, being driven by David Cameron, have raised fears that middle-class households will bear the brunt of measures supposedly aimed at troublemaking youths and other anti-social drinkers. 

Now when this all started it was driven by the recycling of old photographs in the Daily Mail. You know the ones I mean - attractive girl, drunk, draped over a bench. All accompanied by the dire description of our town centres as ridden with drunken violence. So minimum pricing was born - not to make us healthy but to get rid of the unsightly tramp, to discourage the baseball-cap wearing youth from quaffing cheap cider at the park gates and to end "pre-loading" thereby making town centres civilised places where people promenade between tea shops rather than stagger from bar to bar.

But it's not about that now. It's about you and me sitting at home, not bothering anyone and enjoying a glass of wine while watching the X-Factor:

“People shouldn’t think this is just about yobs getting drunk in parks and kids preloading before going out — this is going to affect respectable middle-class people popping into Waitrose for a couple of bottles of sauvignon blanc at the weekend.” 

So from a (misguided and misplaced) policy aimed at those buying cheap booze - by definition these folk don't shop at Waitrose let alone Booth's - we now have policies targeted at the myth of increasing alcohol consumption. It seems we will get a consultation - but it won't be about whether these proposals are a good or bad idea or even whether they will actually achieve what they claim.

Mr Cameron this year backed a 40p minimum unit price, but it is understood that the Home Office will next week seek views on a range of options for a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.

The policy is confused, won't achieve its stated aims, is illiberal, will promote rather than reduce crime and will close down a load of corner shops. And it will annoy people - not much but enough to flake a few more off the Tory branch. These people won't take to the streets in protest. They won't fill the pages of the Guardian or the BBC's bit of the airwaves with their voice.

But they will give both barrels of their opinion to the next Tory canvasser. And I don't blame them.


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The Guardian's writers never check their facts do they? The example of Richard Seymour

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Too much of our politics is dominated by the discussion of class – working-class, middle-class, upper-class and so on. These terms mean almost nothing – is the multi-millionaire builder working-class? How is all this defined? So my apologies for writing about the psephology of class in response to a rather poor article by some chap called Richard Seymour:

The relentless, long-term narrowing of the Tory base since the 60s – as it has become more explicitly the vehicle of financial and monopoly capital, and less willing to articulate popular working-class concerns – has seen Tory support recede from working-class areas.

Arrant nonsense – support for the Conservatives among C2DE social classes has risen since that time not fallen. Here are the facts for C2 voters from Ipsos MORI:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	26	41	40	40	39	27	29	33	37
Lab	49	41	32	36	40	50	49	40	29

And for DE voters:

	Oct 1974	1979	1983	1987	1992	1997	2001	2005	2010
Con	22	34	33	30	31	21	24	25	31
Lab	57	49	41	48	49	59	55	48	40

The truth is that the Conservative Party’s problem is with AB voters not working-class voters – the reason for the Party’s failure to win overall last year lay in getting just 39% of AB votes not in getting the votes of the working class English.

But that truth wouldn’t suit the Guardian, would it! The biggest demographic shifts in British politics have been the shifts of the skilled working class from Labour to Conservative and the loss of Tory AB votes to the Liberal Democrats.

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What do I know, I taught myself to cook? Posh folk and dinner party angst.

The 2010 harvest at The Nook

Connoisseurs of the broadsheet Sunday newspapers will have noticed that the standard definition of “middle class” used by assorted lifestyle writers is different from that in common usage. Indeed, it seems to me that the “middle class” lifestyle set out in the pages of glossy supplements is better defined as ‘rich but not quite rich enough to have a manor house and a flat in Kensington’. And this describes the rarefied and select world of the foodies described by such lifestyle writers. Here’s Lucy Cavendish (who isn’t remotely middle class one suspects from her Debrett entry):

The only way to keep up these days is to cook properly. You have to know your cuts of meat, the right oil to use (never fry using olive oil, for instance), the difference between mascarpone, fromage frais, ricotta. And how do we all know about this? Cooking courses. That's how.

Now leaving aside the ignorance of this paragraph – if they’re saying don’t fry with olive oil that rather rules out any Italian cooking – what on earth is this writer on about? Cooking courses? They’re things you buy a foodie for a fancy present not things you can afford to pop onto at a whim. Unless you’re Lucy of course:

I can't move for friends going on courses. They're either off to Hugh (Fearnley-Whittingstall) or Rick (Stein). They are at Sarah Raven or Darina Allen in Ireland, or up in Scotland smoking fish.

Not my friends. Nor do my friends have that foodie angst about what to serve, where the meat’s from, whether it’s organic or how the lettuce comes from the allotment. But angst sells the cooking courses:

Yet Jay Rayner believes our lust for cooking has a deeper psychological meaning. "It's all about us desperately trying to prove we have a hinterland," he says. "People think it's bored housewives going on cooking courses, but it's not. No one has time to be bored now. It's because cooking is self-contained. It has a beginning and a middle and an end, which is unlike all the areas in the rest of our lives such as rearing children, work, and so forth."

No Jay. People go on cooking courses because they’ve the time and money to do so. And because they want to learn how to cook well. Existential angst is what you’re selling – scaring people whose Friday night dinner party involves escaping from work at 4.43, driving like an idiot to Morrison’s grabbing a selection of goodies and some booze, going home and turning it all into something good to eat for the guests.

I’ve never yet experienced any of the ‘one-upmanship’ that seems to bother Lucy – the suppers, dinners and teas I go to at friends are just a nice meal with good company. Which is the point of a dinner party. However, Lucy can’t resist finishing with a snobby quote from Escoffier and an aside from Jay Rayner that:

Rayner doesn't think there's anything wrong with our quest to learn more skills, however - as long as we realise that that doesn't necessarily make us good cooks.

There, there you troubled posh darlings. It’s OK, you learn how to bake. And self-important food writers like Jay (can he actually cook?) will take the piss out of you. In the Guardian!

The real middle classes – people like me – will carry on untroubled by not having anywhere to put a wood-burning stove (let alone any desire to own one) or by the need to go and learn complicated and fiddly, over-flavoured dishes just to impress. Cooking is pretty easy – good ingredients, simple processes, the right timing. Bingo – great food.

But then what do I know? I taught myself.

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