Private schools continue to divide 'them and us' Britain

PEOPLE who go to fee-paying private schools (and that's about seven per cent of the population) believe that they are both superior to those educated by the state and more deserving of extreme financial rewards. Their assumptions of entitlement and superiority are dividing society and creating "social apartheid". So says the National Centre for Social Research (NCSR), whose annual survey of prevailing social attitudes was released yesterday.

Decades after Margaret Thatcher and John Major blandly announced that class was dead in Britain, it is playing a greater part in dividing one Briton from another than at any time since before World War Two. The NCSR reports that the fee-payers are becoming a self-replicating elite. They marry one another; they give each other jobs; and they assume that this is how it is meant to be. Researchers found a "sense of superiority bonus" among the privately educated.

'People like us', with a God-given right to the best jobs and the highest salaries, now dominate the heights of both the professions and the financial world. They believe, for example, that company chairmen should earn £237,000, nearly £100,000 more than the figure suggested by state-educated respondents.

As we all know, products of these schools dominate public life: the prime minister (Eton); the deputy prime minister (Westminster); the chancellor (St Paul's); the mayor of London (Eton). The privately educated retain an enormous advantage in gaining places at the 'best' universities, where the net-working which began in their school days continues to flourish.

We all know that this is true, but, when the ills of our society are analysed, the massive class divide is seldom blamed as a source of our fast-growing inequalities and our desperate situation. The people at the top not only continue to pay themselves grotesque sums of money and believe they "deserve" it, they are blind to the consequences for British society.

It was (to some extent) ever thus, with public school dunderheads in charge of our industries with often disastrous consequences. But until recent times, change was in the air, allowing Thatcher, Major and others to make what were manifestly bogus claims that Britain was somehow becoming a meritocracy. It was possible (just) to believe that everyone had an equal chance.

This now would be a ludicrous claim. The Victorians would recognise the 'them' and 'us' of contemporary Britain. There are many reasons: the death of most grammar schools (divisive in their way though they were) took away the ladder of educational opportunity for many; hard times make people think of themselves and their families rather than of the wider society; there is a natural instinct for people at the top to recruit staff in their own mould; the decline in the Christian religion, which, at least in theory, preaches a doctrine of equality.

But the biggest engine of all is surely a massive cultural shift, caught from time to time by quotes like that of Lord Mandelson (Labour, remember): "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich." The Thatcherite philosophy that anyone who could afford a car would be a fool to queue for a bus has taken complete hold. The rich no longer even claim that their wealth "trickles down".

The lack of philanthropy is one indicator of rich attitudes. Ian Hislop of Private Eye recently fronted a TV documentary entitled When Bankers Were Good, with the not too subtle emphasis on the word 'were'.

We had the summer riots, a clear indication that British society is fracturing: a large number of our fellow citizens live beyond the pale with no access to a decent education (or decent anything) and the opportunities an education provides - and that's disregarding the networking aspect of 'public' schools. The seven per cent cling jealously to their privileges, supported by their praetorian guard of the right-wing press. Any suggestions that we might all be better off with a little more fairness are condemned as 'the politics of envy'.

At the time of the post-war Attlee government, George Orwell suggested that the essential reforms leading to a fairer country were not the nationalisation of major industries (then going on apace), but the abolition of the House of Lords (then, of course, entirely hereditary) and of the public schools. As an Old Etonian, he knew whereof he spoke. ·