US still Trumps us for social mobility
THIS time last year I was in America’s Rust Belt asking voters why they had put Donald Trump in the White House.
No prizes for guessing the top answers: He’s gonna take on the elite, fight for the little guy, get our jobs back and (all together now) Make America Great Again!
It was easy then to mock their naive belief in that orange orb of selfconsuming fakery, and even easier now, as Trump has, by some distance, the worst approval ratings ever for a US President entering his second year in office.
Which may partly explain why, after a storming speech at the Golden Globe Awards, Oprah Winfrey is being urged to run in 2020, with opinion polls saying 48% of Americans would vote for her. Enough to easily make her POTUS.
To which a British cynic might ask “why would they want another rich TV star in power when that’s precisely what’s turned them into a bigger global joke than Krusty The Clown?”
And to which an American cynic might reply “what are the chances of Britain electing as its prime minister a black woman born into abject poverty to a teenage single mum, who was sexually abused by family members and impregnated at 14, yet who went so far without any connections?” And we’d be stumped. Or rather we’d try to delete that photo of the first meeting of Theresa May’s new cabinet this week, which looked like a Belgravia gentleman’s club with a few of the chaps thinking it was Bring Your Wife To Work Day. The reshuffle was supposed to create a government that “looked more like the country it serves”, yet out of 23 Cabinet members only one is non-white, only six are women and 34% of them attended fee-paying schools (up from a preshuffle 30%) which is five times more than the general population. Oh, and half of them went to the two universities that educate less than 1% of us. No starter for 10 for guessing which ones.
The PR photo is supposed to show they’re hard at work, discussing how to build “a country that works for everyone” when it looks like they’re comparing notes on Christmas skiing trips, inquiring if the next recess coincides with Eton’s half term and checking who’s up for a spot of lunch at the Savoy.
When May’s spokesman was asked why products of public schools had grown in a Cabinet supposedly out to reflect the wider country, he said at least it was an improvement on David Cameron. Indeed it was. Up until a couple of years ago we had more Old Etonians in government than at any time since the late 1950s.
Mind you, last month the Government still had a Social Mobility Commission, until the entire board resigned in protest at the lack of progress towards a “fairer Britain”.
They claimed that nothing was being done to change the fact that despite only 6.7% of the population being educated privately, 71% of top military officers, 74% of top judges, 61% of the country’s top doctors, 42% of top actors and 32% of MPs received paid-for educations.
Sadly, unlike America, getting to the top in Britain is still mostly about your class and who you know, not your talent and what you know.
As May’s shuffling of the chaise longues on the first-class deck of her Titanic clearly shows.