Michael Young: The Rise And Fall Of The Meritocracy
Michael Young embodies the promise of the Labour party but also the doubt that it can ever live up to its self-stated ideal. He will forever be the man who brought the 1945 general election manifesto into being, from his position as director of Political and Economic Planning. But Young is also, although his apostasy is less storied, the man who had given up on the Labour party by 1950, claiming that it had run out of ideas and who in 1981 quit to join the Social Democratic Party, where he became the inaugural director of its in-house thinktank, the Tawney Society.
Young is therefore a paradoxical figure for the Labour party. There are echoes of his thinking in the early works of the Starmer government, but none of them send us back to the Attlee manifesto. The first quotation from Young is the Labour party’s love for creating institutions. It is often said in the seminar rooms of the left-leaning that a legacy is measured in the institutions that are left behind. The most conspicuous and most revered example is the National Health Service, but the next most cited is the Open University, one of Young’s many suggestions. Young was in fact a serial inventor of new bodies. The Consumers’ Association, Which? Magazine and the National Consumer Council all derive from his inventive capacity for institutional legacy.
The Labour party has inherited Young’s desire to put a new plaque on the door. GB Energy is an institution in pursuit of a purpose. The Office for Value for Money, announced by the chancellor last autumn, should perhaps already be closed down on the grounds that it is not value for money. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority will be merged, for reasons that are unclear, with the National Infrastructure Commission to create the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. The early Blair years were full of the same sort of ambition. The Learning and Skills Council and Connexions, which offered advice to young people, were bodies that failed to outlast the government which created them.
Young had another two recurrent enthusiasms to which the Labour party has in practice paid lip service while sounding generous in theory. First, he was a strong advocate of co-operatives, which Labour governments have embraced with warm words but little else. Second, from 1955 Young wrote a series of monographs with Peter Wilmott which were dedicated, in the title of the most famous example, Family and Kinship in East London. Its basic tenet was to give people more say in running their lives and institutions. The idea was to strengthen the working-class family as a model for cooperative socialism. It’s not the kind of thing you hear Ed Miliband saying very often.
Labour also has a peculiar relationship with the book for which Young perhaps looms largest: his 1958 satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. The Labour party has a partly meritocratic impulse, leavened by a more formulaic demand for a stricter equality. In 2001 Young wrote a critical piece in the Guardian in which he took issue with Tony Blair’s adoption of the idea: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others”.
The tension was there from the start. The Rise of the Meritocracy was commissioned by the Fabian Society, which then refused to publish it (as did 11 other publishers). Young’s book is not a commendation of the idea of meritocracy, which then passed into the common language. It is instead a tale of a dystopian land in which the combination of inherited intelligence and effort constitutes the sovereign value of the land. Young’s satire describes a stratified society in which the power-holding elite tells itself the story that it deserves its separation from the disenfranchised underclass. This was, among other things, a satire of the tripartite system of education that had been in place since the 1944 Butler Act. Not just in this book but also elsewhere in his published output, Young contributed to change from the grammar schools—the archetypal institution of the soi-disant meritocrat—to a comprehensive school system.
Could the Starmer government be described as meritocratic? In a sense it could, if by that term we mean that people from modest circumstances—Starmer himself among them—should figure prominently in the rhetoric of the government. And, indeed, the Schools Bill that the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is currently taking through parliament shares this bias towards the comprehensive system, although perhaps not quite in the way that Young might have upheld.
In the party that was founded by the voice of the producers, Young was the tribune of the consumer. The Schools Bill does not do a great deal more than remove freedoms that academy schools have enjoyed since the Labour party’s 2005 Schools Act. The widely voiced criticism is apt: this looks like the revenge of the producer-class. The bill reveals Young’s divided soul. A desire for comprehensive cover exists uneasily, if it can exist at all, alongside the promiscuous demands of consumers or, in this case, parents.
Schools policy ran down a generation in the Young family. Michael Young’s son, Toby, to put it politely is not always known for his policy inventiveness but he is the founder of an academy school in Hammersmith, west London and was for a short time the spokesman of the trade body that represented the new types of school. Toby is a much more comfortable opponent for Labour than Michael. It is a patchy picture, as befits a rather patchy government. There are plenty of tensions in the thought of Michael Young but it is hard to avoid the uncharitable corollary that at least some of the contradiction is the government’s.
