Top Highlights

• Like universal suffrage and world peace, every politician in modern Britain purports to be in favour of meritocracy. For most of Britain’s history, young people have grown up with a keen sense of their station in life. Historically, Britain has been a country with a rigid class system, where education was a luxury afforded only to a small minority....
• Things only really began to change (and even then very slowly) with the passage of the 1870 Education Act, the first piece of legislation committed to providing education on a national scale. The policy was driven by Liberal MP William Forster and enacted at a time when the political establishment in Britain was beginning to grasp the frivolity of ...
• The poor might, after all, use their newly stimulated cerebral matter to imbibe subversive literature and, as a consequence, get ideas above their station. And so, during a debate in the House of Commons in 1807, the Tory MP Davies Gilbert warned the House that ‘giving education to the working classes would be bad for their morals and happiness. It...
• Twenty-first-century social democracy will defend to the death your right to be unequal to the next man – as long as merit, rather than wealth, has placed you on your allotted rung of the ladder. Young’s oracular warning of half a century ago has been recast as a blueprint.
• Spending on public services gradually increased in Labour’s second and third terms (during Blair’s first term in government, public spending as a percentage of GDP actually fell),17 but New Labour’s time in government was characterised by a hands-off approach to the super-rich. As a consequence, economic inequalities unleashed by eighteen years of ...