Another voice
Thoughts on privilege
Auberon Waugh
eople may suppose that it is a pretty thin 1. week when a fellow decides to write about the Social Democratic Party Green Paper on education policy. Education is a depressing enough subject in itself, but there is something uniquely depressing about the whole idea of SDP policy documents. They have neither the interest of honest, independent intellectual inquiry nor the authority of disinterested expert opinion nor even the menace of a document from the Labour Party which might, if things go horribly wrong, return to persecute us all.
They are the product of a series of com- promises worked out within a committee of bossy, opinionated, self-important bores who have nothing better to do with their time than sit around deliberating on how they would spend other people's money if they were given the chance. Nothing they say is remotely interesting or original. But the document has a certain melancholy in- terest in the evidence it affords of the SDP's essential character as the party begins to emerge from being a beautiful New Idea in- to its assured identity of a national institu- tion, reshuffling the same stale and usually discredited ideas between the same collec- tion of garrulous enthusiasts and would-be political opportunists.
Labour, as I say, can still raise a shudder by reminding us of the stupidity, envy and brooding hatred which sleeps, like Caliban in his cave, until such time as the monster awakes to rule our island again. The SDP raises little more than an irritated yawn as it strikes self-important attitudes and parades its second-rate opinions in the political wilderness. But I think we would be wrong to ignore it, because it illustrates a thread of futility running through a large section of the British middle class. Exactly why the British middle class should be so much sillier than its French, German or Italian equivalents is another matter. My own ex- planation, as readers may be aware, points to the guilts and resentments generated by the cruel and unnatural British system of primogeniture which historically divided the rich from the middle classes in a way which few other advanced countries have experienced. But this cannot really explain the eagerness of the new middle class — the Normans and Judys — to embrace the sort of collectivist, egalitarian attitudes which are directly opposed to their own economic interests and social aspirations.
An early opinion poll of SDP members revealed that 18 per cent of them favoured complete integration of all independent schools within the State system, 54 per cent merely wished to see the removal of all tax concessions to independent schools, while
28 per cent wished to leave things as they were. None, apparently, wished to make school fees tax-allowable, which strikes me as an obviously just proposal, and none favoured the suggestion put forward by 'in- tellectual' conservatives from time to time and studiously ignored by everyone else, that the State should discharge its educa- tional duties by a system of education vouchers, to be cashed and supplemented by parents as they choose.
The Green Paper more or less exactly reflects this balance of opinion. The ma- jority favouring the removal of any surviv- ing tax concessions has its demand met, the small minority demanding full integration is appeased by appropriate noises, while the larger minority which requested that the present unjust and punitive system be left alone might seem to have carried the day. The most important thing, as nearly all the newspapers agreed, was that the Green Paper does not recommend abolition of the private sector, at any rate for the moment.
At this point we may pause to wonder whether the questions asked or the answers received accurately reflect the opinion of SDP members. Personally, I doubt it. Although the Normans and Judys of this world undoubtedly do exist, and although many of them flocked to join the SDP, it is a simple act of patriotic faith on my part that they are not nearly so numerous as their appearances on every public platform might suggest.
Be that as it may, we can discuss the SDP only in the image it presents of itself, through those who have pushed themselves forward as its spokesmen and study groupers and those who have pushed themselves forward to answer its poll ques- tionnaires, and the picture is a gloomy one.
Its earlier Green Paper was on decen- tralising government, but it is not addressed to you and me so much as to all those Nor- mans and Judys who want to have some hand in political decision-making and boss- ing the rest of us around. The Education Green Paper is quite different. Here, for the first time, some sort of SDP ideology begins to emerge. Among all the promises to in- crease public expenditure on education in every direction, there is the bald statement: `We must ensure that there is no public sub- sidy to privilege.' Before examining what, if anything, this statement means in the con- text of education policy, we might examine its apparent corrolary that there should be public subsidy to unprivilege.
Alone among all the newspapers which mentioned this SDP document the Daily Mirror, in a commendably short report, seized upon the proposal to pay wages to sixth-formers as its most significant section. I think the Mirror was right. The idea of bribing children to stay at school — or more particularly, of bribing parents to allow them to stay there — is not, of course, a new one. Other bossy, well- meaning people have looked at it before and decided the time was not ripe, they could not quite get away with it. But this myth of the poor, industrious child, who wishes to stay at school while his brutish grasping lower-class parents won't let him, dies very hard. No doubt a few such unfor- tunates exist in every academic year. To cater for them, the SDP profess to pay all sixth-formers — the 16-19-year-olds who stayed at school — a wage commensurate with what they would receive on the dole if they left school. One day, perhaps, it will enter their patronising heads that what these people really hate is education. Until then, every British child must be paid to stay at school, fixing for all time that educa- tion is something being wished on them for their own good by people like ,Shirley Williams, who know best — rather than something they would be well advised to seek for themselves.
We must ensure there is no public subsidy to privilege. The whole structure of govern- ment is a gigantic subsidy to privilege — not just in the sense of providing chauffeur- driven cars and first-class railway tickets for our administration, but in the whole ap- paratus of government extortion and. disbursement which exists for no other reason than to allow tens of thousands of useless, self-important little men and women to sit in offices making decisions, apportioning sums of money and directing the human traffic. Where would any of these people be — where would the unions be — without the privileges of exercising power? People who pay for their own children's education can scarcely be described as receiving a subsidy when in fact they are subsidising everyone else. But the most nauseating give-away of all is the use of privilege as a general swear-word, presupposing some naturally ordained state of equality which has never existed and never will exist.
Is it privilege to have a prettier garden than others when You have dug, weeded and planted it yourself? Cleaner shoes when you have cleaned them? Or hired some- one else to clean them? To have better clothes for your children when you have chosen and paid for them? A bigger, pleasanter house for yourself and your family when you or your parents have saved for it, bought it and maintained it? Better mannered, more employable children when you have exerted yourself to bring them up? Children with a better start in life in anY and every, way it can be secured? If any of these things is true, then the abolition of privilege will lead us into a universal, state- directed pig-sty. Yet the rhetoric of the SDP — all 65,000 middle-class thinkers -- assumes without question that privilege is something to be abolished. The sanest response, I feel, to those who whine against privilege is to kick them.
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