Livre d'Or

I want to say something about what grammar schools and free university education from the 60s (ish) to the 90s.* So my father grew up on a council estate in the 1950s. His mother would have loved to be a teacher but had left school at 14 in order to pay into the family accounts (which I think enabled her brother to have further education). Dad got to grammar school and thence to university and married a vicar's daughter (who'd been to a direct grant school and university). Dad's sisters also got to higher/further education and they all moved away from the estate where they lived and eventually their mum moved into the granny flat under the middle daughter's house in Cheltenham. I think all 6 grandchildren (me and my cousins) are culturally middle class though possibly only my brother has the salary to go with that. I'm not sure how dad regarded himself in the end, I think like a friend 8 years younger than me (with a grammar school and Oxbridge education), he became bilingual but neither one thing nor the other.

I think dad's story illustrates the way grammar schools worked for "social mobility" of taking a few bright working-class kids and giving them access to "middle-class" education (either my grandfather or great-grandfather was told by his father that grammar school wasn't for the likes of them) and giving them success at the expense of leaving their roots behind. And I grew up with a model where you went away to university and then found work somewhere and rather looked down on those who either didn't go away to uni (either not going or communiting to local one) or came back. I now wonder how much I missed out on by not being deeply rooted in a place. But by coming away, I have found my people (generally Queer people, and if not queer than geeky) in a way that I didn't have growing up. Is that a reason why Queer issues are seen as foreign to the "working class" because the working class are perceived to be members of rooted communities with strong family ties and people living round the corner from where they grew up and Queer people often find no place for themselves in those communities and leave for more fluid communities?

The Labour movement was also deeply patriarchal and white - see the women at Dagenham and the Bristol Bus Boycott where the unions weren't AIUI on the side of the excluded. But they did provide a political education to many and that education route doesn't really exist so much now, and it's harder to work your way up from the bottom and then get a union role and get into politics from there. At some point, with greater access to HE for everyone, people went of to get a uni education and then to management jobs. And concurrently with that Maggie Thatcher took on the unions and curtailed their power hugely. And then there was a tendency for unions to join together (so UNISON was formed in the 90s from other unions and Unite similarly) which brought some gains in influence (1 union speaking for lots) but I think probably lost a lot in connectedness to the workforce and in abilty to build solidarity and education of the issues. And now we're in the situation that it tends to be better paid occupations which are more likely to be unionised, and that can be quite an individualistic unionisation (so I'm a member of a Union** but have no idea if any of my colleagues at my place of work are also members of that or another union, though interestingly we did get an email a few weeks ago pointing us in the direction of said union after a staff meeting I missed due to leave). I know a GMB staff member who is involved in work to get more people from the gig economy etc into unions.

There is also something to be said about the role of right-wing media in all this. Where the unions used to provide information and education, now people get their info from the Daily Fail, Express and assorted online scaremongering places. There was always a part of the working-class that was socially conservative and knew its place and liked the safety of traditional roles. Unions often widened that perspective by bringing in academic analysis of the situation and uniting people around working for that. But now, those doing that work are perceived as middle-class do-gooders not working class people understanding their own oppression (even when they are working class people who've been to uni)



*Loans come into supplement grants in the ?late 80s, and tuition fees came in in 1998. I got a grant in 1997 as the year my brother and I overlapped. With the introduction of tuition fees came the loans where you paid back a proportion of what you earn over a threshold replacing the original loans where you paid a proportion of what you owed when your income reached a higher threshold.

**Two years ago I learnt the hard way why not being a Union member is bad idea.