Hard times in Britain

“In the beginning was the word And the word was Mum...
Then they added Dad...”
From The Book of Leftovers by Bachchoo
Readers of my generation gathered our notions of Britain from books and our ideas of America from films. There must have been a time when I imagined that British society had moved on from the miseries described by Charles Dickens to the frivolities plotted by P.G. Wodehouse.

The corrective to these images and perceptions came later. My aunts in Pune used to subscribe to a magazine called Woman and Home and leafing through it gave me a hint that the cities of the United Kingdom were no longer the gloomy Gothic constructs of earlier centuries or the spread of Victorian streets as in Dickens’, but the frailer buildings of council estates and the rusty brick spread of suburbs.
The magazine, catering to the new reading classes, post the 1940s secondary education bill which made schooling compulsory for the whole population, attempted to make these buildings look cheerful. I fell for it.
The other strong corrective to the first impressions through novel-reading were the plays and prose of what has come to be known as the “kitchen-sink” school of writers. John Osborne, John Wain, Arnold Wesker and others of their generation introduced the readers (not “audience” as none of the plays were performed in India because, I suppose, theatrical cosmopolitans such as Alyque Padamsee staged plays in Mumbai which were usually more jolly or American) to working class lads and lasses who had been through university and could no longer relate to the culture of their working-class parents.
It is now easy to see that the post-war egalitarianism of the country led to the election of the Attlee Labour government and subsequently the expansion of university education, through Tory and Labour administrations, giving the working classes access to better paid jobs and social positions.
When stated as a generalisation it sounds as though many were called, but in fact few were chosen. From such beginnings and the promotion of working-class children through grammar schools to universities and into the professions was Britain transformed into a proper and competitive meritocracy. And still the question of access from all classes to the best universities remains.
The present coalition government has passed an act which will require, for example, my youngest daughter Tir, who applies later this year for a university place, which she takes up in 2012, to borrow from the government £9,000 (`700,000) for each of three years just to pay her fees. Her living expenses for each of those years could cost her £15,000 more. She’ll be saddled with a debt of anything between £30,000 and £70,000 depending on what I can afford to pay towards her education. Her brother and sisters who all went to very good universities (Leeds, Sussex and Cambridge) didn’t have to borrow and don’t have to spend years of their earning lives paying back.
This new fee hike, against which students have vigorously protested, will certainly mean that fewer pupils from the working classes will consider a university education. It may be that the Tories whose philosophy stresses the virtues of pluck, competition, entrepreneurship, survival of the fittest, dog-gently-eat-dog and proposes that reduced welfare benefits support the hindmost, don’t have the same idea of meritocracy as the Oxford dictionary.
The electoral parliamentary system requires that all politicians have to pose as generators, facilitators and reformers of the mechanisms of social mobility. They all have to tell the population that Arbeit Macht Rich, but in a world in which bankers, who gamble with other people’s money and charge them bank charges for doing it, take millions of pounds in bonuses each year while workers face inflation and increases in tax on normal purchases and fuel, it’s not very convincing.
It is very clear that by the end of this government’s term the social stratum of Britain will be “less equal” than it was. This government even has a stated ideology which it has christened “The Big Society”. No one, not even British Prime Minister David Cameron whose speech writers invented it, quite knows what it means. To some it means that volunteers will clean the streets replacing or supplementing waged dustmen. To me it seems to mean that the mechanisms of meritocracy will be impeded and the population will be invited to find ways, apart from the certification of superiority through educational qualifications, to get on and get rich.
It may be that Britain has reached a plateau in the climb of the degreewallahs. Which is in stark contrast to India where education and higher and higher quals are still the mechanisms of advance. The Indian Institutes of Technology, which began the year I was in my second year of college studying sciences, have bred thousands of techno-millionaires. One pays impossible premiums to bribe one’s way into medical college. Every dinner party conversation seems to have some mummy grumbling that her 10-year-old son’s mark in maths or cognitive psychology went down from 99 to 98 per cent and it’s keeping her awake at night or some father boasting that his three-year-old son stood first in golf at his boarding school.
In my own day — the 1950s in school and the 1960s in college — the meritocratic race was in full swing. In the final two years of school, we were streamed into those who would do the Senior Cambridge certificate with exam papers set and marked in England and those who would do the Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE) which was set and marked in India. It was at this stage that laggards and boys (many with full beards and moustaches) who had been compelled through failure to repeat various academic years several times were removed from school. It was rumoured that they were being privately tutored to sit the “Punjab Matric” which was a label for an exam that no one failed. I hasten to add that it was never proved that this exam was set or marked in Ludhiana or thereabouts, but certainly some very feeble competitors seemed to hold such a matriculation certificate, one which was, alas, not recognised by most Pune colleges as a qualification for admission.
Once at the college, the insulting epithet used for lecturers we didn’t like was so-and-so: “degree by post!”