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WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : Britain
Oxbridge-the British Establishment’s essential club
By a correspondent
12 September 2001
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The following article deals with the political and social role played within
British society by the elite universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Such is the
predominance of graduates from these two bodies within the highest
echelons of business and politics that they are often referred to by the
conflated term “Oxbridge”. The article was sent to the World Socialist Web
Site by a reader. We welcome all such serious efforts to comment on social,
political, economic, artistic and scientific issues.
In 1950s and early 1960s the British Establishment was shocked to discover
that four of its own, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and Donald
Maclean, were spying for the Soviet Union.
Burgess had left Eton in 1930 and gone on to Trinity College, Cambridge,
where he fell into the company of his co-conspirators. They formed a
fashionable, leftwing clique, much the same as those found in most British
universities at the time—the offspring of wealthy men with no comprehension
of the working class they claimed to champion. Yet unlike similar groups in
universities such as Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, and Leeds, these four
young men were sought out and recruited by Moscow’s security services.
The reasons behind their recruitment make a telling example of how the top
levels of British society work, a model understood well by the KGB, if not by
the majority of British citizens.
Had the KGB recruited four similar undergraduates from any other university,
it is unlikely that even one of them would have progressed to a position of
particular use, let alone national importance. Yet all four of these recruits did,
gaining influential jobs in the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI6, and even
Buckingham Palace. To this day, attendance at Oxbridge provides the
essential qualification for progress through the British Establishment—the
collection of financiers, aristocrats, land owners, mainstream politicians and
civil servants that has maintained such a firm grip on power in the UK. Of the
42 British prime ministers who attended university, 40 went to either Oxford
or Cambridge.
Establishment sources promote Oxbridge as the repository of Britain’s finest
minds, where the brightest and the best gather to be educated in the rarefied
atmosphere of the two university towns. According to conventional wisdom,
this is why graduating students tend to succeed. Yet until the mid-60s,
alumni of the seven elite English boarding schools (Eton, Harrow,
Westminster, Rugby, Winchester, Charterhouse, and Shrewsbury) were not
even required to pass exams to gain admission. The headmaster of Harrow
even lodged a complaint when he discovered that his pupil’s would finally be
assessed on their A-level results.
Establishment sources are also inclined to claim that the system of
patronage and class distinction has now disappeared, replaced with the
supposed “meritocracy” of the Thatcher years. Yet given the fact that so
many of the admissions tutors are themselves Oxbridge alumni from the age
of overt discrimination by background, this claim seems as false as any of
the other various means of obfuscation used by the Establishment to hide its
unaccountable and undemocratic power from the British electorate. Several
well-documented cases of admissions tutors refusing entrance to well-
qualified working-class pupils have appeared in the British media, the most
famous being that of Laura Spence, the bright schoolgirl from the Northeast
who was unfairly denied a place at Cambridge.
Despite claiming to be the voice of an undoubtedly enraged British public,
the professedly “serious” national press generally takes the side of the
universities in these matters. This is hardly surprising. Charles Moore, editor
of the Conservative Party’s house-organ, the Daily Telegraph, attended Eton
and Trinity College, Cambridge (incidentally the same combination that
produced Burgess). Peter Stothard, editor of the Times, is an honorary fellow
of Trinity. “I have never particularly liked the idea of the Times as an
establishment paper. I don’t think it is correct historically,” he disingenuously
asserts in an interview with Cherwell, the Oxford University newspaper. Max
Hastings, patrician editor of the London Evening Standard, went to
Charterhouse and Oxford. Even Alan Rusbridger, editor of the supposedly
liberal Guardian, is an alumnus of Cambridge.
Loyalty to their respective alma maters resulted in them focusing attention
away from a condemnation of the universities’ admission procedures towards
an attack on Chancellor Gordon Brown, who had been the most high-profile
of those to complain about the treatment meted out to Laura Spence. In
parliament, a five-man committee of MPs condemned Brown for his stance
against Cambridge. Any pretence at democratic debate was undermined by
the fact that the three panel members who supported the committee’s
resolution were Oxbridge alumni. The two Labour MPs who voted against it
later complained of an “Oxbridge mafia” and disassociated themselves from
its findings. Quite why a panel without any compromising connections to the
university in question was not selected is open to question.
Statistically neither university can defend its policy of discrimination against
working-class state-school applicants. They currently make up less than 50
percent of Oxford’s intake (despite accounting for almost three quarters of all
university applicants). Despite this, more than two thirds of first-class
degrees awarded by the university, the highest award for academic
excellence, are bestowed on graduates from state-schools. Figures from
Cambridge tell a similar story. This obviously contradicts the insistence of
Establishment apologists that they merely select the best applicants.
When such facts are laid before them, the defenders of social privilege try a
different tack. One foolish Cambridge don left his notes at a radio station
after he had been attempting to defend the university in the wake of the Laura
Spence affair. These stated that Spence, “like all state-school pupils,” lacked
sufficient confidence to do well in the Cambridge interview. Apart from being
a frankly extraordinary and unsustainable generalisation, the don offers a
telling insight into the selection procedure. Firstly, “confidence” is not a
faculty of intellect, and thus it is hard to see the justification for a supposedly
academic institution declaring it to be an essential criterion for acceptance.
Secondly, the question must be asked, who is likely to be more comfortable,
and therefore confident, in an Oxbridge interview situation? A working-class
girl from the heavily-industrial Northeast with no family background of
university acceptance, or a Southern public-school boy unfazed by received-
pronunciation accents, crusty dons, or ancient buildings? In addition, the
number of educational advantages enjoyed by privately educated school
pupils are too numerous to mention here, but neither university has ever
seriously attempted to take these factors into account in their enrolment
procedures.
This correspondent has had the dubious privilege of socializing with the
British Establishment at various stages of his life. One particularly revealing
interview undertaken was with a wealthy publisher—the son of a Nazi
sympathizer and follower of the British fascist leader Oswald Moseley, and
also an advisor to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—with wide-reaching
connections within the Establishment. His insight into life at Balliol College,
Oxford ran as follows: “The state school guys were effectively confined to
their own JCRs [junior common rooms], because they didn’t know anybody
in other colleges. We [attendees of public schools] knew guys in the other
colleges, so we could network and get to know more people”. This
networking resulted in a large number of acquaintances that would go on to
either manage large amounts of inherited capital or use their connections to
achieve positions of influence.
On another occasion, a recent graduate of Eton and Emmanuel College,
Cambridge proudly informed this writer that he was the fifth successive
generation of his family to attend that particular college. He now works in the
City for a venture-capital company, despite his degree in English Literature
seeming to confer upon him no discernable qualification for such a position.
The level of public-school bias varies from one Oxbridge college to another.
Some like to recruit from particular schools to maintain their “character”,
hence the number of Etonians at Christchurch College, Oxford—in 1998
around a third of the 258 Eton school leavers were accepted into Oxbridge.
Perhaps the most outrageous case of discrimination occurred in 1998, when
an admissions tutor, Dr Eric Griffiths, humiliated a working-class interviewee
called Tracy Playle (again at Trinity College, Cambridge). After accusing her
of not being to able to recognise some “squiggly lines” as Greek script, he
went on to mimic her Essex accent until she left the interview in tears. The
fact that this exchange took place, demonstrates that far from shedding their
preference for rich, well-spoken public-school applicants, such prejudice is
alive and kicking in Britain’s two most prestigious universities. In a PR
exercise, Griffiths was removed from his admissions role by the college after
widespread media coverage, despite the protestations of the Establishment
press who put forward the astonishing contention that these (publicly-funded)
universities should be able to accept whoever they like by whatever criteria.
Playle was not offered a place at Trinity, but went on to obtain a first-class
degree from Warwick University.
The use of Oxbridge as a finishing school for the British Establishment has
other benefits than allowing students from ruling-class backgrounds to enjoy
the company of their peers and to network. An Oxbridge education allows an
individual in British society to claim an intellectual superiority over anybody
who does not share his or her particular point of view.
While the products of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, with their sinister
vetting procedures, continue to hold the vast bulk of influential posts within
British public life, it will require a seismic shift in popular awareness to
dislodge them. It is therefore more vital than ever that democratic control is
wrested back from the network of vested interests and back-scratchers that
constitute the British Establishment. No one can reasonably expect change
to occur within the current political club—the capacity to obtain positions of
influence within our society is severely limited without the Oxbridge stamp of
approval, a fact that was recognised by the KGB when they recruited
Burgess, Blunt, Maclean, and Philby. Given that the popular media is
beholden to the very same Establishment which continues to control the
wealth of the country generated by the working class, given the pro-business
character of the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair (who studied
at Fettes and Oxford), the best hope of changing popular awareness is
through an independent media that can speak outside the grasp of
multinational corporations and their capitalist agenda.
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
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