Anthony Howard - The state of Britain? (35/41)
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The prominent British political observer, Anthony Howard (1934-2010) reported on global political issues for over 40 years for 'The Guardian', 'The Sunday Times' and 'The Observer', and was editor of the 'New Statesman' and 'The Listener'. He received a CBE in 1997. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: I'm hopeless on the state of Britain questions. I think they're the most boring books that have been written, called The State of Britain and all the rest of it. What would I say, though?
I mean, I'd say that in many ways, we've made a lot of progress. That when I look back, you know, it is amazing that when I went to the press gallery in the House of Commons in 1958, I was only about 23 years old, one quarter of the Conservative Party, the governing party, came from the same school. One quarter of Conservative MPs were Old Etonians. We went on to have three Prime Ministers on the trot who came from the same school. We went on to have Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home. In succession, three Old Etonians. Now I'm not against Mr Cameron being an Old Etonian, good luck to him. But I don't think we'll ever see David Cameron succeeded by two other schoolfellows again. So, in some ways, we've made progress.
We've also made progress, I think, in terms of representation of minorities. Not good enough yet in the House of Commons. Not good enough for women, certainly not good enough for ethnic minorities, but we've made progress and things are better off than they were. Where have we slipped back? I think we've slipped back in creating a Brahmin caste, who are quite different from the rest of us. And this Brahmin caste are the people who become politicians, who go into politics. They're picked off like, say, the Dalai Lama or something, at a very tender age, go into the Conservative Research Department, go into the Trade Union Research Department, and they're about 21. And they've never done anything else in their lives. Never, ever. Now we've already got a civil service that consists of a Brahmin caste, that's how they're recruited. They're sort of recruited from the moment they leave the university, and they spend the next 40 years in Whitehall. Do you want to duplicate that with those who are meant to be the people in the front office? I can't see the point of it. It seems to me that it was better, though some people think it was very old-fashioned, that when I first became a journalist, if you went to the House of Commons, you were enormously… saw all these brigadiers on the backbenches, you saw all these, sort of, Rear Admirals. You saw businessmen, even. You saw people who were, sort of, Sheffield Master Cutler and this kind of thing. None of that exists today. There is no one in politics, really, who's come up the hard way. There is that guy who's in the cabinet... Johnson, I think... he's been a postman and became General Secretary of the Post Office Workers Union. But that's very unusual. When I first went into the press gallery, you looked down and there were quite a lot of ex-union leaders on the floor of the House of Commons. I mean, Bevan blazed the way, but after that there were Alf Robens, people like that. None of that exists anymore. Instead of which, we have a caste, a cadre, that has been sort of trained from the word go, who have never known any other life but the life of being in politics, who have no experience of the world outside, who, I think, are… and I think this is where the political class is rapidly growing apart from the general public, because it is so secluded.
And that, certainly, is one place where, at least I think have got worse rather than better. And it happened, I think, largely by accident. We've had one or two throwbacks along the way. Somebody like Michael Heseltine belongs to the old dispensation. You make your money, you become a businessman, then go into politics. People don't do that anymore. Probably he's the last one we shall see of that kind of person. They may take a job in PR, like David Cameron, with some television company or something. Basically, they've done nothing except what they know about. They become… I think this may be one of the troubles, it may go back to these special advisors that were invented. Not really until about the 19… beginning of the 1970s, I think, or thereabouts, that you got this sort of recruited young men, bright young men, who went to work for secretaries of state here and there, and they immediately got bitten by the bug, so they wanted to become secretaries of state themselves, and therefore they became, first of all, MPs. [...]
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