Saturday, August 30, 2014

Top of British society is a racket for the privileged...

Much of the upper crust of British society is a racket for the privileged in defiance of the democratic wishes of the majority. That really is the core of Elitist Britain, that while 95% of Britons believe "in a fair society every person should have an equal opportunity to get ahead", the figures in a government report published on Thursday reveal an ingrained unfairness.

Only 7% in Britain are privately educated, and yet this section of society makes up 71% of senior judges, 62% of the senior armed forces and 55% of permanent secretaries. It is quite something when the "cabinet of millionaires" is one of the less unrepresentative pillars of power, with 36% hailing from private schools.

The statistics should provoke Britain's media into a prolonged period of self-reflection. They probably won't since 54% of the top 100 media professionals went to private schools, and just 16% attended a comprehensive school – in a country where 88% attend non-selective state schools. Forty-three percent of newspaper columnists had parents rich enough to send them to fee-paying schools.

In the case of the media this has much to do with the decline of the local newspapers that offered a way in for the aspiring journalist with a non-gilded background; the growing importance of costly post-graduate qualifications that are beyond the bank accounts of most; and the explosion of unpaid internships, which discriminate on the basis of whether you are prosperous enough to work for free, rather than whether you are talented. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Top 1% taking lion's share of global growth...
  2. UK taxpayers pay for the rich’s greed...
  3. The amount of money hoarded by the uber elite will astound you...
  4. The politics of class warfare: from Sydney to Washington, the gulf is deepening...

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