Like 20 British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham’s new cabinet minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, went to Eton. After graduating from the nation’s most elite independent school, Narayan participated in Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied– what else?– PPE (politics, approach and economics), like David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Ed Miliband and a host of other senior politicians. An MBA at Stanford and a profession in the City followed.But Narayan’s
background is hardly normal of the British gentility. Born in Bihar in eastern India, he moved with his family to Cardiff when he was 12. He and his younger bro were sleeping on the flooring of their one-bedroom home when an instructor at his local high school suggested the bright young boy obtain some independent schools. His parents, who had actually signed up with the Labour party nearly as soon as they showed up in Wales, ran a gas station. Eton was possible only thanks to a full scholarship.Graphic Class and representation in 21st-century Britain can be complicated. By some yardsticks, for example, the makeup of Burnham’s ministerial group, which was announced after he became prime minister on Monday, could be seen as a backward action. More than a fifth of his cabinet participated in independent schools for most of their education– sometimes, under Keir Starmer, every senior minister went to a state school. And a remarkable 54 %of the ministers now leading government policy went to Oxford or Cambridge, up from 29% under Starmer.(Nationally, the figure is 1%.)In other methods, however, Burnham’s leading group is more diverse than in the past, with half
of those participating in cabinet– including, obviously, the PM– representing northern constituencies. And for the very first time in history, the cabinet has equal numbers of females and men. Among them, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is amongst those who were educated privately– this after she and her household showed up in Britain as asylum candidates from Liberia in 1986. How much does all of this matter? The prime minister’s top ministers ought to be competent– do they need to be representative too?To Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, which works to promote social mobility, the response is an emphatic yes.”Of course, the background of the cabinet matters. If they’re meant to be representing the country, they must be representative of the nation. We would absolutely state that you get better choices if you have a wide variety of views, viewpoints and backgrounds around the table.”The sample size of 28 cabinet attendees may be little, but to Sam Friedman, a professor of sociology at London School of Economics whose work focuses on class and inequality, its makeup is symbolic of the wider access to power in Britain. Scrutinising those in senior positions”supplies a window into a wider conversation about how individuals’s backgrounds form their ability to arrive positions in our society”, he says.Graphic Power in Britain stays overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of an extremely narrow group of people, according to Friedman’s research. He points out that pupils of the nine most exclusive independent schools are still
, today,
52 times most likely to reach elite positions than those who go to any other kind of school. Oxbridge graduates born in the 1960s and early 1970s– Burnham was born in 1970 and went to Cambridge– were more than 250 times most likely to reach the British elite than their peers who did not go to university.The cabinet– whatever its makeup– is merely the visible tip of a vast iceberg of powerbrokers, whose own elite backgrounds can be type in the way government choices are taken, argues Friedman. According to his own research surveying attitudes amongst the elite, he states “those who are brought up
in more fortunate backgrounds tend to tilt to the right”, and “people in positions of power in the cabinet are often engaging with civil servants and business leaders who moderate their capability” to take decisions.To Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social movement at the University of Exeter, it is genuine to scrutinise the backgrounds of those running the nation, however “counting private schools and Oxbridge degrees just tells part of the story. The genuine challenge is whether ministers understand how Britain’s modern opportunity system
now works.”Conventional markers such as school attended or parents’occupations no longer signal advantage in the simple way they when did. Today’s divides are progressively shaped by wealth, location, networks and the hidden cultural codes that govern entry and development into our elites.”The obstacle goes way beyond broadening access to the standard paths to power,
important though that may be, Major argues. Rather, political leaders of whatever background must grapple what he calls”the profound unravelling of the pledge of modern industrialism”– the truth that, for individuals in their 40s and younger, there are now more people experiencing downward mobility than upward,
indicating they are less well-off than their parents.” The test for this government isn’t whether ministers themselves are socially mobile. It’s whether they can create a society in which many more people have real chances to flourish,”Significant says.Dr Daniel Evans, a speaker at Swansea University whose work consists of a focus on politics and social class, agrees.”The origin story [of politicians] is a bit of a red herring,”he says.”The bigger story is the total collapse of the graduate premium and the financial obligation that trainees are entering in university and how brutal the task market is for graduates.” We keep speaking about social movement as if everyone can do it, however university runs out grab loads of people economically, the task market is horrendous. No one can get a flat. The discourse hasn’t kept up. “