Theresa May puts accent on meritocracy for Britain

A few weeks ago, I was at a 60th birthday party in London, where many of the guests were at Oxford with Theresa May in the 1970s. Late in the evening, I ran into an old friend who recalled his first impression of the future prime minister and her circle in the Oxford Union.

“You’d see them in the Union bar, all these grammar school boys and girls, sitting in a corner plotting their political careers,” he said, each syllable soaked through with disdain.

I thought about his remark in Birmingham this week when May was describing to the Conservative Party conference her vision of a more meritocratic society.

“I want us to be a country where it doesn’t matter where you were born, who your parents are, where you went to school, what your accent sounds like, what God you worship, whether you’re a man or a woman, gay or straight, or black or white. All that should matter is the talent you have and how hard you’re prepared to work,” she said.

For a people often perceived to be obsessed with it, the English seldom speak about social class, at least in public, and almost never in the specific terms used by the prime minister, mentioning accent as well as education. But among the many unexpected consequences of the Brexit vote is the return of the language of class to the centre of political discourse in Britain.

May's agenda for a more activist government has been variously characterised as a grab for the centre ground in British politics, an attempt to attract disillusioned Labour voters, and an effort to combat the rise of Ukip. Low political calculation aside, it suggests that May has joined Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in concluding that the decades-long consensus in support of a lightly regulated free market no longer serves the interests of the British people.

Mass movement

Corbyn’s approach is less overtly about class than May’s, and unlike her, he did not mention the working class in his leader’s speech to the Labour conference in

Liverpool

last week. He hopes to build a mass movement in favour of alternative economic policies, based on the influx of tens of thousands of new Labour members. Many of these young people are struggling under student debt, low wages or precarious employment. Others have faced the brunt of cuts in funding for public services. Corbyn’s project is influenced by left-wing movements and parties elsewhere in

Europe

such as Syriza in

Greece

and Podemos in

Spain

. May has no such role models to follow, and if she succeeds, she will be the first leader of a major European centre-right party to address the economic as well as the cultural basis of support for right-wing populism.

Other centre-right parties, such as those in France and Austria, have sought to combat the rise of the far-right with tougher policies on immigration and the integration of religious and ethnic minorities. But most remain wedded to the liberal economic policy consensus that has held sway throughout Europe since the reforms of Gerhard Schröder in Germany in the 1990s and are reflected in EU policy agreed in Brussels.

The electoral success of Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, along with the Brexit vote, has intensified interest across Europe in the loss of faith among many voters in the old political mainstream. This is reflected in the success in Germany this year of a translation of Retour à Reims (Returning to Reims) a memoir by the French sociologist Didier Eribon.

A sensation in France when it was first published in 2009, it describes how Eribon’s working-class family transferred their political allegiance from the communists to the National Front. Eribon places much of the blame on the centre-left’s abandonment of the entire concept of class and of the need for resistance on the part of one class against a more dominant one.

Collective identity

“I am convinced that voting for the National Front must be interpreted, at least in part, as the final recourse of people of the working classes attempting to defend their collective identity, or to defend, in any case, a dignity that was being trampled on – now even by those who had once been their representatives and defenders. Dignity is a fragile feeling, unsure of itself; it requires recognition and reassurances,” he writes.

In her speech in Birmingham, May used the language of dignity and respect in speaking about what she calls “ordinary working people” but also the language of conflict, making clear that if one section of society is to advance, someone will have to pay.