A positive idea in a letter in the Guardian today……from Simon Jenkins to Laurie Penny no more articles. I can just hear the pipsqueaks……’this is not the right way to tackle inequality’ …..it’d be a fucking start though wouldn’t it.
Just to emphasise the point Owen Jones has two whole pages to plug his new book – already had a large chunk earlier in the week……..still he’s our new Orwell so shouldn’t carp. The book is a 38% style well worn run through of injustices ending thus………’the question is not whether such an establishment is unjust…….the question is whether it is sustainable’. I suspect Jones’ new book will not be so uncritically reviewed elsewhere.
STOP COMMISIONING ARTICLES FROM PRIVATE SCHOOL AND OXBRIDGE WRITERS
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Reblogged this on SMILING CARCASS'S TWO-PENNETH and commented:
Of course the question is “…whether such an establishment is unjust…”; its sustainability has been proven for almost a millennia, back to the days of the Norman invasion and feudalism. The rich rule, we serve.
All ‘Oxbridge’ writers?
I went to Cambridge 20 years ago from a comprehensive school on the outskirts of Sheffield. I was the second person from my school to do so. Both my parents left school at 15 and my dad had been long-term unemployed in the 80s. When I got to Cambridge, my overwhelming impression was that many people there already knew each other & the deals were already done. I made friends but was constantly aware of my ‘difference’. I hardly met any other northerners. Post-uni I didn’t walk into a well-paid job found for me by my parents or friends of friends. I had no privilege to offer back so no one was offering me anything (which is how it works). I didn’t look or sound like a person who had been to ‘Oxbridge’, or at least people’s stereotypes of such people. I went back to Sheffield (I had no money to go & live in London, say, & do internships, or ‘work experience’, as it was then called) & worked in shops/doing data entry i.e. the work I could get, interspersed with periods of unemployment. I applied for hundreds of jobs & didn’t get interviews. Eventually I was lucky enough to get work in local authority art galleries where even after 10 years or so I was never paid much more than average earnings (& was extremely grateful to earn even that, because it was a damn sight more than a lot of people I know). Then, two years ago, I got made redundant…
Occasionally I do a bit of writing about art. Very occasionally, I get paid for it. If – unlikely, I know – a national paper offered to commission a paid piece, you & the writer of the Guardian letter seriously think I should be debarred from writing it, on the grounds that I went to Cambridge 20 years ago? Why? Perhaps you feel that I didn’t assimilate enough to my privately educated peers, didn’t attempt hard enough to make myself indistinguishable from them, should have changed utterly who I was & forgotten where I came from in order to avail myself of the ‘privilege’ some people seem to believe is freely on offer to all who study there?
So, you didn’t join the club. Would you now?
I’m sure you know Eric ‘George Orwell’ Blair went to Eton before going to Spain to fight in the Civil War. He later reflected that had he really known what was going on in Spain, he would have joined the Anarchists.