A bigger middle class is the best sign of progress
‘We want to create opportunities for all: a society in which everyone has the chance to go as far as their talent and hard work will take them, regardless of background.” Thus begins a new Civil Service document called ‘Measuring Socio-economic Background in your Workplace’, signed off by Oliver Dowden, a Cabinet Office Minister and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary.
As this newspaper revealed on Saturday, the Government is pushing this document on leading employers and imposing it on its own employees. Staff are being asked to fill in a long questionnaire about their socioeconomic background, including what school they went to, the occupations of their parents, and whether they think themselves posh, lowly or somewhere in between.
In its own words, the document contradicts itself. It wants people to do well “regardless of background”, yet it then sets out to study that background as closely as possible. The same mistake is made here as is made in the quantifications of “diversity” which beset modern employment. Instead of people being accepted on merit, they are defined according to race, sexuality, sex and now, class. This reinforces the problems the Government thinks it is trying to solve.
It also places blame in the wrong place. If, for example, the survey reveals that a company employs a higher proportion of people who went to independent schools than that in the overall population, you can bet that this will be taken as a black mark against it. But it might be that the general standard of state education is so poor that the better-trained minds emerging from independent schools do indeed perform better. In which case, the company is recruiting well: it is state schools that need to improve.
There is an even bigger fallacy here – that if you believe in social mobility, the middle class is bad. Almost the opposite is true. A growing middle class is the surest sign of social mobility that you can have. In 1914, 10 per cent of homes were owneroccupied. Today, the figure is 64 per cent. That is a true symptom of social mobility and one which has nothing to do with government bossiness.
If employees are bullied into filling in this nonsense (it is, at least, not compulsory), it is a racing certainty that the results will be used to block future applicants from professional backgrounds or with private education.
So recruitment would not be “regardless of background” and talent would be spurned on class grounds. Why is a Conservative Government doing this? The most British place in the world is 8,000 miles away. The Queen reigns, the currency is the pound and, oddly, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the bishop, although he has not actually been there. A local beer is called Iron Lady. Meat and alcohol cost virtually nothing, but a pineapple is £30.
These are the Falkland Islands, and they are thriving. At the time of the Argentine invasion in 1982, Britain had let the place run down economically and there were only 1,800 people living there.
Today there are 3,200 permanent inhabitants, who include mainly black mine-clearers from Zimbabwe who are plentiful enough to form a good choir. There is also between 1,500-2,500 British military. With the exception of defence, the islands pay for themselves.
Tourism is big, with 57,000 visiting last year. There are no direct longdistance flights to the islands, but the second regular flight to go by way of Argentina will start soon. Relations with Argentina are much better. This year, there were moving ceremonies when the British and Falkland authorities, having managed to find and identify almost all the bodies of Argentine soldiers killed in the conflict, made an agreement for their families to come and commemorate them at their now marked graves. This friendliness comes from a position of strength. In the referendum of 2013, 99.8 per cent voted to stay British.
Fishing rights, properly established after the British victory, ensured that the Falklands enjoy their own territorial waters, have produced global success. Fifty per cent of all the squid eaten in southern Europe comes from the Falklands, and 94 per cent of all Falklands fish is exported through the Spanish port of Vigo.
Last week, the Falklands’ representatives were in London for the Joint Ministerial Council which covers all British overseas territories. They believe that their relations with the British Government are improved, but they worry about being collateral damage from Brexit. This would happen if the EU were to slap tariffs on all that top quality squid which southern Europeans like so much.
It would be a sad twist of fate if people so close to us in spirit, if not in miles, and whose freedom we protect, were to suffer now that we are reclaiming ours.
Our children have just been to see the film Hereditary. They say it is the most terrifying film ever. Set in the House of Lords, the story concerns a haunting of the building by a weird creature known as Viscount Hailsham, who never stops moving amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill so it can be trapped forever in his chamber; or so I am given to understand. I don’t dare go and see it.