I also hope Singapore would stop using it:
Down with meritocracy
The man who coined the word four decades ago wishes Tony Blair
would stop using it
Michael Young
Friday June 29, 2001
The Guardian
I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the
Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general
circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently
found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair.
The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say
has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between
1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in
2033.
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Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly
unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on
to the word without realising the dangers of what he is
advocating.
Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical
analysis of what had been happening to society for more than a
century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s, when
schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil
service became the rule.
Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But
irrespective of people's birth, status has gradually become more
achievable.
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their
merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit
of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in
it for others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed
between the classes more or less at random, has become much more
highly concentrated by the engine of education.
A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and
universities to the task of sieving people according to education's
narrow band of values.
With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its
disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and
its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time
they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or
before.
The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control,
by which it reproduces itself.
The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the
historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged
would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at
school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.
They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so
woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.
It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be
judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally
naked as that.
They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those
who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and
spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with
the class from which they came.
Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the
powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry
between the haves and the have-nots.
With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were
partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them
have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even
bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to
represent them.
To make the point it is worth comparing the Attlee and Blair
cabinets. The two most influential members of the 1945 cabinet were
Ernest Bevin, acclaimed as foreign secretary, and Herbert Morrison,
acclaimed as lord president of the council and deputy prime
minister.
Bevin left school at 11 to take a job as a farm boy, and was
subsequently a kitchen boy, a grocer's errand boy, a van boy, a
tram conductor and a drayman before, at the age of 29, he became
active locally in Bristol in the Dock Wharf, Riverside and General
Labourers' union.
Herbert Morrison was in many ways an even more significant figure,
whose rise to prominence was not so much through the unions as
through local government.
His first job was also as an errand boy and assistant in a grocer's
shop, from which he moved on to be a junior shop assistant and an
early switchboard operator. He later became so influential as
leader of the London county council partly because of his previous
success as minister of transport in the 1929 Labour
government.
He triumphed in the way Livingstone and Kiley hope to do now, by
bringing all London's fragmented tube service, buses and trams
under one unified management and ownership in his London passenger
transport board.
It made London's public transport the best in the world for another
30-40 years and the LPTB was also the model for all the
nationalised industries after 1945.
Quite a few other members of the Attlee cabinet, like Bevan and
Griffiths (miners both), had similar lowly origins and so were also
a source of pride for many ordinary people who could identify with
them.
It is a sharp contrast with the Blair cabinet, largely filled as it
is with members of the meritocracy.
In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been
doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old
kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once
helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the
Blair government.
The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as
more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement
comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever
they can get.
They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who
knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but
because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries
of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality
on their side.
So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on
the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the
business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted,
all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have
been invented and exploited.
Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have
proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have
multiplied.
As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous
with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders
of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and
characteristically for greater equality.
Can anything be done about this more polarised meritocratic
society? It would help if Mr Blair would drop the word from his
public vocabulary, or at least admit to the downside. It would help
still more if he and Mr Brown would mark their distance from the
new meritocracy by increasing income taxes on the rich, and also by
reviving more powerful local government as a way of involving local
people and giving them a training for national politics.
There was also a prediction in the book that wholesale educational
selection would be reintroduced, going further even than what we
have already. My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of
meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that "No longer is
it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a
higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes".
At least the fullness of that can still be avoided. I hope.