Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?
The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered these attacks – Matt Goodwin – has countered that he is the first person in his family to have gone to university. He has also stressed that he was brought up in a one-parent household.
That hasn’t cut it with the class-warriors of his rivals like the Green party’s Hannah Spencer. In one of her campaign videos, Ms Spencer has gone so far as to do a speech to camera while preparing some plaster for a wall. Having been a plumber, she is, she has said, training to be a plasterer. A craft she appears to be some way off mastering, if her video is anything to go by.
In a recent interview the Green party candidate expounded on her view that someone who had taught at a university should not represent Gorton and Denton. In fact it seems that anyone who has a degree should not represent any constituency. As she complained: ‘In Westminster I think 90 per cent of MPs have at least one degree, and it’s time that we changed that.’
Warming to her theme, she declared: ‘I want to see tradespeople on the benches in parliament, cleaners, taxi drivers, people who work in takeaways.’ Personally I would be very happy to hear the views of more taxi drivers on the benches of the House of Commons. But I cannot help thinking that Ms Spencer might be alarmed by some of their more robust attitudes and promptly demand the return of more people with liberal arts degrees to the green benches.
It is a peculiar competition, however. It seems that one response to the era of poor governance we have recently gone through is to view education as the problem.
It reminds me of a recent caller to LBC who voiced the opinion that if Keir Starmer were to be swapped out as leader by his party, she would not want Angela Rayner to become prime minister. The female caller explained: ‘Angela Rayner is not a suitable person to lead the country, because she is not sufficiently educated.’ The show’s host, Tom Swarbrick, feigned utter horror at such a sentiment. ‘How well-educated do we need people to be?’ he asked. The caller said that she was ‘fiercely working-class’ herself, but that she thought Rayner did not have the education or vocabulary necessary. Swarbrick (who has a degree in theology from Cambridge) claimed to be ‘astonished’ by the views of his caller, and sent her away saying: ‘Because it’s gone really well with all the Oxbridge lot.’
And there you have it. It seems to have settled in as a view that because David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson were the products of an Oxbridge education, the problem is our top universities. As a result, the best qualification to be in politics is to have had nothing to do not only with our top universities, but with any university at all. In fact it would be preferable to be led by people who have just been hauled off a plastering job, ideally while eating a pork pie. Go a stage beyond that, and it seems to be accepted that we might be better led by people who are uneducated than those who are educated.
This seems to have become a theme on the other side of the Atlantic too. One of the main contenders to be the next Democratic candidate for president of the United States is the California governor Gavin Newsom. A man of some charm and intelligence, he also has nice hair, a lovely family and is white. So he has had to try to find a way to ride America’s own pendulum swing.
Promoting his recent memoir to a largely black audience this week, he made the following pitch: ‘I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. I’m not trying to offend anyone, act all there if you got 940, but literally a 960 SAT guy.’
To translate this into English-English, Newsom is boasting that his test scores at school were below the national average. And therefore he is like the people, you see.
Elaborating his point, he went on to inform his audience that he cannot read. Although that is perhaps not the best way to persuade people to buy his book, he informed them: ‘You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.’
This, too, was meant to make him more suited to represent the people than any of those highfalutin reading types. Newsom claims to have had dyslexia since childhood, and while there might have been a happy period when overcoming dyslexia put someone on an even plain with a non-dyslexic person, it now appears that on the left of American politics, having dyslexia and not being able to read a speech actually makes a man better qualified to lead.
So I suppose we can look forward to a future where we are led by people who never performed well at school, failed to attend university and have only just started a plastering course as a prelude to running the country. And what possible downsides could come from that?
Personally, this over-swing makes me want to swing back the other way. The more I see politicians or would-be politicians competing like Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen, the more I lament the erasure of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. In fact, as I watch Newsom in California and the various contenders in Gorton and Denton, I am starting to think up my own new set of standards for our elected representatives. I propose that in future nobody should be allowed anywhere near politics unless they have at least one hereditary title – no lower than a marquisate and preferably averaging out at around an earldom. That should fix things.
