New Generation, Same Old Elites

Their investigation challenges the prevailing rhetoric about how the people running Britain have changed. Powerful people often give the impression that they belong to a new generation of strivers, replacing the gentlemanly coasters who once dominated Westminster and the City of London. This talk was especially prominent during the formation of the new Labour government. Although Sir Keir Starmer is reserved about his personal tastes and passions, he does like to describe himself as the son of a toolmaker. His current cabinet is notable for being the first in history where all members have been educated at state schools.

On the other hand, voices on the Right argue that a cultural rather than a class revolution has spawned a new elite. Matt Goodwin, the sociologist turned rabble-rousing pundit, contends that what unites a coterie in academia, the media, and professional sectors is its desire to inflict woke nostrums on an unwilling public, particularly concerning gender and the crimes of British Empire.

Reeves and Friedman neatly counter both these claims. Their analysis of Who’s Who shows that it has always mainly profiled a “positional elite” of around 33,000 people: those who occupy leading posts in important institutions. While there has been change and expansion in what counts as an important institution over time (the churches are down, the creative industries are up), recruitment to this elite has been stable over recent decades.

If you have parents from the professional classes — better still, parents who were themselves in Who’s Who — and if you have been to a fee-paying school (better still to an elite fee-paying school), if you have attended Oxford or Cambridge and if you are a man or if you enjoy a cumulative combination of these advantages, then you are many times more likely to end up in Who’s Who than most people.

Inherited Merit

The members of today’s elite may have studied harder than their predecessors — although Reeves and Friedman are a bit naive in taking the performative amateurism of Oxbridge in earlier decades at face value — but they have still inherited their positions rather than earned them. And they are not the woke army of Goodwin’s nightmares. Survey evidence shows that they are mildly right of center and hold views that aren’t much different from the general public on most subjects. The real, though slow, increase in the percentage of the elite who are women or drawn from ethnic minorities affects this pattern less than one might imagine. This is in part a selection effect — intersectionality by another name.

People from ethnic minorities who get into Who’s Who are more likely to have had the social, financial, or educational advantages of their peers and to share their conservative outlook. Some report little or no personal experience of racism, and many seem only mildly more disposed than their peers to insist on a historical reckoning with the British Empire. Contemporary Who’s Who women disappoint Reeves and Friedman because, while they are more disposed toward economic egalitarianism than men, they are behind them in their enthusiasm for “trans rights.”

If privilege still plays such a dominant role in recruitment to this stodgy elite, then why do its members fervently insist that the opposite is true? The interviews in Born to Rule feature plenty of people who do their best to make their careers sound more hardscrabble than they are. One man claims that although he went to St Paul’s, a prestigious London day school, his father was the “poorest parent” there. Perhaps he protests too much: the Old Etonians around David Cameron used to call George Osborne “oik,” because he had attended St Paul’s, despite being the son of a baronet. Reeves and Friedman make much of the humble or nondescript hobbies of current Who’s Who members — walking the dog, going to the pub, or spending time with family — contrasting them with the previous generation’s display of cultural pursuits like reading, opera, and art collecting.

Reeves and Friedman draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory in his La Distinction (1979) to explain why the elite has replaced dinner jackets with quarter-zip fleeces. Bourdieu argued that in a postwar world of converging living standards and lengthening leisure time for everyone, the French bourgeoisie resorted to amassing cultural capital to elevate themselves above the masses. Because a Renault worker came home and fired up the television, a university lecturer had to haunt film festivals, know about wine, and plan enriching vacations. The British elite once seemed to do something rather similar — although it is a stretch to claim that the example of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group persuaded them to do so. But today, the elite have taken to camouflaging their cultural capital in a populist climate that is hostile to airs and graces.

This explanation seems plausible enough — although Reeves and Friedman’s enthusiasm for this account nearly causes it to falter on their plodding attempts to prove it. They run an experiment to establish Who’s Who entrants are 8 percent less likely to mention enjoying a highbrow book if they have just been reminded that the public dislike the wealthy — a strained exercise in number crunching.

Low-Profile Silk Stockings

This example illustrates the book’s often labored commitment to quantify truths that most British people already know: that who you know (or are related to) is just as important as what you know. Reeves and Friedman are so determined to juice their principal source for numbers that they overstate its revelations. Who’s Who might be part of the furniture of Oxbridge senior common rooms, but during the years I (a privately educated, white male) spent in them, I never saw anyone consulting it. The “positional elite” it celebrates is too large and diffuse to be defined by a clear ideology or a shared interest in running Britain. Elites are so-called because they accumulate and wield power, but lots of people included in Who’s Who on account of their respectable posts — bishops of the Church of England or classics professors — are not very powerful.

Awareness of these shortcomings pushes Reeves and Friedman to make a more interesting and troubling point about wealth. Lurking within the positional elite is a much smaller and more coherent “wealth elite” of around 6,000 people. These people got into Who’s Who because they come from money and tend to have significant wealth themselves. The true extent of their wealth is understated in both cases, as the financial planning industry finds ways to bypass inheritance taxes, ensuring that it doesn’t show up in probate records. The wealth elite is likely larger than it appears in Who’s Who, as many of the new rich today — unlike the dukes and other territorial magnates who still feature in its pages — prefer to remain private figures, despite their interest in wielding power to advance their financial interests.

Again and again, the authors show that it is in fact the very wealthy who are most successful in clambering up the social summits. This is hardly surprising. Even if we do not follow theorists such as Ralph Miliband — whose Oxford educated sons, Ralph and Ed, are naturally enough in Who’s Who — in defining the elite as simply a vehicle for capital, it’s nonetheless clear that British power has long been intertwined with clerical, mercantile, political, and financial elites.

The “gentlemanly capitalism” that flourished from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in Britain, concentrated in London and the South East, encouraged a convergence of interest between the statesmen and intellectuals who defined the state’s strategic and ideological goals and merchants and financiers. This pattern continues, although it is possible that the Thatcherite and Blairite fondness for wealth creators has made the clout of the mere rich more overt: CEOs are on the up in Who’s Who, while the percentage of members who belong to the military and the church are down.

It’s About Capital, Not Talent

The long-standing dominance of British society by people who are intent on amassing and passing on capital puts the other mechanisms of elite reproduction that interest Reeves and Friedman — and which, to be fair, obsess many Britons — into proper perspective. They like to talk of the “propulsive” effect of fee-paying schools and Oxford and Cambridge, as if they were responsible for boosting the individuals who attend them past their contemporaries. Yet their evidence shows that the people who profit the most from these institutions were and are those who are already very wealthy. Posh boarding schools are associated with social power because the powerful favor them.

In recent decades, they have maintained their appeal in a context of greater competition for educational attainment by becoming more selective in who they admit. Put simply, they concentrate rather than instill talent. Oxbridge similarly tends to anoint, rather than create, members of the power elite. Wealthy Oxbridge undergraduates arrive at these institutions with their networks and sense of social assurance already in place and are five times more likely to end up in Who’s Who than their fellow students.

This failure to distinguish the essence of power from its shiny exoskeleton leads Reeves and Friedman to suggest underwhelming solutions for the problems that they have identified. They want to cap the percentage of privately educated students who can be admitted to Oxbridge and to randomize the entire process of admissions to eliminate its bias toward southern England and London, where both the positional and wealth elite are clustered. Twiddling with Oxbridge admissions has long been a cottage industry and a spectator sport in Britain, but it generally confuses cause and effect: as Reeves and Friedman themselves show, it does not create wealth and power — it merely polishes them.

Their other proposals for producing a representative elite are either trivial or unrealistic. The wealth elite will not be much troubled by their proposal to replace the House of Lords — a museum of imploded politicians — with a worthier talking shop for the positional elite, a senate whose rotating membership would be drawn from across the nation. Their suggestions for leveling the financial playing field in Britain are sensible but would be very unlikely to ever get off the ground. The reason that council taxes have long ceased to fairly reflect huge differences in value between residential properties is that political parties know that the press would eviscerate any attempt to bring in meaningful property taxes.

Elite Power, Now More Inclusive

Born to Rule keeps telling us why the picture it has generated “matters.” Their aim is not to understand the elite, but to change it, even if the book’s bullet-point revolution seems unlikely to accomplish this. But why does it matter if Britain has a narrow and rigid elite, one that is ever more responsive to the priorities of the extremely wealthy? Of course, we could argue that equality of opportunity — if not outcome — is a good in itself. But that is the business of political philosophers, not sociologists. And Reeves and Friedman don’t seem to be making that argument in any case. Instead, Born to Rule expresses a faintly Blairite hope that a statistically representative elite would somehow perform better. It might pursue more progressive agendas, support redistributive policies, and be more open to confronting Britain’s grimy imperial past if it weren’t so dominated by the wealthy and old-school ties.

But even if one could engineer an elite that hailed from more egalitarian backgrounds, it would not necessarily lead to more progressive decisions. Starmer might be the son of a toolmaker, but he has been just as staunch in backing Israel’s war on Gazans as his Tory predecessor in office Rishi Sunak, the Winchester- and Oxford-educated son of a pharmacist, who married the daughter of an Indian billionaire. Sunak, for his part, has been rhetorically harsher in his hostility to immigration than his Old Etonian predecessor Boris Johnson, or the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, a daughter of Nigerian immigrants who married a Scottish banker.

The pioneering and perhaps best investigations into the British elite took place in the ’60s and ’70s. They were written by crusading journalists such as Anthony Sampson, whose sharp eye for the quirky customs of Britain’s powerful tribes made up for their lack of sociological rigor. Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain (1962) was a characteristic product of the age of affluence, reflecting a belief that a British elite open to all talents could steer the country to greater prosperity. Today it will take more than an injection of fresh blood to rescue Britain, which has an atrophied industrial base, an aging population, and a disintegrating geostrategic position. Toby Young’s peerage seems like the least of its worries.