Spiked, November 29, 2019

Franglais is here to stay

France's word police need to accept that languages are never 'pure'

Spectator Coffee House, November 28, 2019

What happened to all the 'Vote Tory' signs?

General Election time in Britain invariably means you're going to see one thing on the streets: loads of Labour, Green and Lib Dem posters displayed outside people's houses and in front windows, but hardly any Conservative ones. In my 11 years living and travelling around Kent, I haven't seen a single one. The last time I saw one was in the Holland Park area of West London in the early 1990s. If you live in a city centre, they are a rare species indeed.

This has been the pattern for decades now, especially since the Thatcherite 1980s, when Rik Mayall's character in the comedy The Young Ones popularised the notion that all Tories were 'capitalist scum or 'fascists' (even though the character was an imbecile, and actually a send-up of student radicals). By then it had become the popular consensus that Tories were selfish and money-obsessed and that to vote Labour was an act of supreme virtue and altruism. In the last general election, I happened to find myself in the affluent north London area of Crouch End. Nearly every house was festooned with a Labour poster. These were not houses that had any material interest in seeing a Labour; quite the reverse. But I bet it made them feel as one and feel good.

As Twitter has also paradoxically illustrated since, some left-wing people, armed with an unshakeable sense of their own moral righteousness, can be quite nasty at times. There has always been that second thought that spiteful people with a grievance and who lack a sense of doubt might put a brick through a window bearing Conservative poster.

This consensus hasn't changed much, especially in more recent years. A few years ago, James Bartholomew of this magazine coined the term 'virtue signalling, to indicate people voicing an opinion, usually a left-wing one, and often without sincerity, to ingratiate yourself with your peers.

I like to think I got there first, at least in the context of British society, having written a short book in 2003 which described what I called 'conspicuous compassion'. This phenomenon had shown its roots back in 1985 with Live Aid, where people successfully joined in something bigger than themselves, sung along with Status Quo and Queen and helped prop up a Marxist dictator as a consequence.

The real watershed came in 1997. Like many people I found the public outpouring following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales unreal. There were signals that displays of emotionalism combined with ostentatious, unconvincing and indeed menacing signs of 'compassion' were becoming the order of the day. 'Show us you care!', some demanded of the Queen.

The 1990s was the decade in which Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, playing the uncuous DJs Smashy 'n' Nicey, would liked to boast: 'we do a lot of work for charidee.. but we don't like to talk about it.'

In real life, ribbons for all manner of causes began to proliferate. Remembrance Day poppies got bigger and bigger and were sported earlier and earlier. Minutes' silence began to be held for tragedies that were diminishing in gravity. Politicians like Tony Blair were beginning to apologise for historical sins, an act that cost him zero in emotional investment.

Anti-war marchers seemed less interested in actually stopping conflicts, but keener to brag about their personal distaste for them. 'Not in my name' was their slogan. This was compassion inflation, mourning sickness. It was not the sign of a more caring society. It was the symptom of a cynical, atomised one that would seize any opportunity to bond with strangers.

Of course, neither 'virtue signalling' or 'conspicuous compassion' described something new. The ideas have their origins in Charles Darwin's 1871 book, The Descent of Man, which describes how saying or doing the wrong thing is all part of the sexual selection game. You are not going to get a girlfriend at university if you declare yourself a Tory. Conversely, once you get to middle age you don't really care what anyone's going to think of your political views.  

By the new millennium I was reading a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche. One quote from Human, All To Human convinced me that he had predicted the future and that I had to write a book about the cranky old German: 'Observe how children weep and cry, so that so that they will be pitied... Thus the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one's fellow man.' Somehow his infamous loathing of compassion no longer seemed so perverse.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Spectator blogs, November 14, 2019

Kent’s HS1 shows how HS2 could benefit the North

One of the main concerns about HS2, apart from its vast cost and disruptive effect on the countryside, is that in shortening distances between London and the North, it might lead to the capital further draining talent and money from other regions.

Not so, says an official HS2 review leaked to the Times this week. The draft report by Doug Oakervee, a former HS2 chairman, says that ‘some of the greatest changes to connectivity are the non-London connections’ north of Birmingham, and concludes that cities in the North and Midlands are more likely to benefit from the project than London. He’s right – and Kent’s HS1 shows why.

The line from St Pancras to Ebbsfleet in Kent faced similar objections in the 1990s, before it was fully completed in 2007. But since then, it has benefited destinations out of London, not the capital itself. The route, servicing high speed trains from London to towns all over Kent, has had a transformative effect on the county, helping to revive its dilapidated and once moribund towns and secured the prosperity of its already successful areas.

Perhaps the best-known example of a town coming back from the dead is Margate, right on the north-east tip of the county. Like so many British seaside resorts, its fortunes began to dip in the 1970s with the boom in cheap foreign travel, reaching a nadir in the 1980s. Many seaside towns, such as Blackpool, still haven’t recovered, which makes Margate’s revival stand out all the more.

The cost of London living and the advent of HS1 have combined to help the entire county. For example, in 2017, 1,830 people moved from London to Thanet, the area encompassing Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, with just 760 people moving to London. ‘Up until 2010 this place was really in the doldrums. Really from 1970 to 2010’, Ian Dickie, director of the Margate Museum, told Geographical magazine this month. ‘Now tourists are coming back… The place is beginning to look alive again’. A recent House of Lords select committee, citing the Dreamland amusement park and the Turner Contemporary art gallery (which claims to have brought in £68 million to the local economy since opening in 2011) described Margate as a ‘clear instance of successful culture-led regeneration.’

The pattern is replicated elsewhere. Folkestone, equally miserable at the turn of the millennium, has witnessed a comparable renaissance, albeit with the financial input of local tycoon Sir Roger De Haan. Folkestone also boasts an arts hub, and with it a triennial art show, a book festival and public art collection. The town’s Old High Street is now filled with cafés, boutiques, and music and clothes shops. Folkestone’s harbour, the port of call for ferries until services stopped in 2001, has also been reinvented as a summer venue for bars and cafes.

The town is less than an hour by rail to London since HS1 was opened, and now solidly falls within the capital’s commuter belt. As does Deal, up the coast. By the 1990s this one-time colliery and garrison town had not so much become run-down, but utterly lifeless: the Royal Marines left in 1981 while Betteshanger coal mine was shut down in 1989. Before the high speed connection opened, it took 2hrs 20mins for the train to get into London, which made it nonviable as a commuting town (I know someone who tried the five-day a week commute then; he found it impossible).

Since the HS1 service arrived in 2011, Deal to St Pancras now takes 81 minutes. Consequently, the town has seen its own revival, even reinvention. In 2013 it was the Daily Telegraph’s high street of the year.

It is not all good news. Those escaping London’s spiralling house prices have in turn pushed up prices in the county, and the preponderance of second homes has left some parts of Kent’s towns during the week and in winter deserted. There also remain areas of poverty in Margate and Dover, while Ramsgate high street is a disaster zone. Nevertheless, HS1 has demonstrated that a new, high speed railway, far from sucking more wealth into London, can do the reverse, and bring more people and money out of the capital.

Patrick is a writer based in Deal

Spiked, November 8, 2019

How trans activists made ‘woman’ a dirty wordCalling women ‘cervix owners’ or ‘menstruators’ is ridiculous and insulting.

Spiked, October 18, 2019

Veganism won’t save the planetThis is a cult of self-righteousness, not a sensible eco-diet.

The Spectator Coffee House, October 4, 2019

The RSC should ignore the climate change mob and stick with BP

Patrick West

 "It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business.

Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second Brexit referendum ‘for the sake of the children’ (and even, to make the point clearer, ‘our children’s children’). And in the latest development, it was announced this week that the Royal Shakespeare Company is to sever its links with its sponsor BP, thanks to a mass boycott by teenage climate change protesters.

The long-running anti-BP campaign was given a boost last week when students organised a school strike against climate change, asking their teachers and heads to end trips to RSC events, because BP ‘is actively destroying our futures by wrecking the climate.’ Its open letter added that ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company needs young people far more than it needs BP’, repeating that children are ‘the audience of the future’. Finally, the RSC sighed on Wednesday that it ‘cannot ignore’ these cries, and announced that it was capitulating.

This cult of ‘the children’ and its connected narrative of ‘the future’ is a constant theme of political discourse today, especially when it comes to climate change. On Tuesday, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau told a crowd in Toronto: ‘Today we marched for our planet, our kids and for their future’. But it’s not just consigned to environmental rhetoric. Talk of ‘the children’ has played a central role in demands for a second Brexit referendum, owing not only to the fact that millions have come of voting age since 2016, but that such an important decision on Britain’s future will most of all affect ‘our children’. The same argument is made for lowering the voting age: it’s all about their future, you see.

This cult of ‘the children’ is literally juvenile. We all know how base and emotive the word is. It’s why politicians and charity fund raisers invoke ‘the children’ whenever possible. It’s a word that grabs people’s attention, pulls the heart strings and opens purses. It’s why no newspaper coverage of a political demonstration is complete without a child holding a placard reading something to the effect of ‘Mummy is worried about my future’ – a placard clearly not written by the child herself.

There is something exploitative in offloading one’s personal politics and views onto a child or teenager. Whatever your views on the man, president Putin was right when he said on Wednesday: ‘I’m sure that Greta is a kind and very sincere girl… but using children and teenagers for even such noble aims…is wrong’. And this obsequiousness over the pronouncements of children, let alone taking their views seriously, betrays a sad reality that we no longer take grown-up politics seriously. The brain and mind of a 16-year-old is not equal to that of an adult, and to treat them on a par is to diminish the status of the latter.

Most scientists in the relevant field agree that at the age of 16 the brain has not fully matured. This is why smoking cannabis at this age is especially dangerous: a raw brain is a vulnerable brain. As to the mind’s age of maturity, opinion is more subjective, although many scientists believe that you aren’t fully an adult until about 25. Even if the law in this country considers you an adult at 18, most of us, in retrospect, probably wouldn’t look back on the behaviour and immature concerns of our 18-year-old selves as that of adults, let alone ourselves as 16-year-olds.

There are two ironies about the whole sorry RSC-BP affair. The first is that was BP the first of the ‘supermajors’ to expand into areas beyond fossil fuels, establishing an alternative and low carbon energy business in 2005. One shouldn’t punish a corporation that has been making moves in the right direction in recent years.

Secondly, BP has funded a scheme at the RSC which has provided 16 to 25-year-olds (even BP agree that 25 is the age of maturity) with discounted tickets costing £5 for productions. This scheme is unlikely to survive without its support. So by indulging the views of children, ultimately it is children who will literally pay the price.

All this because adults are made to feel guilty for the presumed doomed future of ‘the children’. Conscience makes cowards of us all.

The Spectator, October 5, 2019

Notes on...Romney and Hythe Railway

Spiked, October 4, 2019

The key to contentment? Embrace strife and woeToday’s overly emotional young people should read some Schopenhauer.

Spiked, September 20, 2019

What I love about McDonald’sIgnore the snobs – Maccy D’s is a sociable, diverse and nice place to hang out.

Oldie Blogs, August 29, 2019

Underground Margate

Spiked, August 23, 2019

The narcissism of the trans movementThe intolerance of trans activists stems from our Me, Me, Me culture.

Spiked, August 2, 2019

Bryan Magee brought philosophy to the massesHe explored the big questions without ever dumbing down. RIP.

Catholic Herald, July 18, 2019

It wasn't Colonel Blimp who gave us Brexit

Spiked, July 5, 2019

How noble causes turn people into monstersPeople can do terrible things when they’re convinced they are on the side of good.

Spiked, June 14, 2019

This Bloomsday, give James Joyce’s unloved masterpiece a try
Ulysses is poetry, but Finnegans Wake is pure music.

Spiked, June 7, 2019

Everyone’s turning into Rick from The Young Ones
Branding people you don't like ‘Nazis’ is infantile and dangerous.

The Catholic Herald, May 31, 2019

Spiked, May 24, 2019

The EU is an empire in decay
It is Brussels – not Salvini or Orban – that is a threat to peace in Europe

Spectator Coffee House, May 22, 2019

 

It is now fashionable to describe Nigel Farage as an ‘extremist’, ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’ politician. Last month, Dame Margaret Beckett denounced his ‘brand of extreme right-wing politics’; this week, Armando Iannucci tweeted:

‘Any vote for Farage on Thursday won’t be seen by him as a protest but as support for his brand of far-right UK politics.’

And on Monday, the author and journalist Ben Goldacre described the Brexit Party leader as a ‘far right ideologue who wants to abolish the NHS.’

 

So what prompts otherwise intelligent people like Iannucci and Goldacre to describe Farage as ‘far right’? And is that description really fair?

A quick glance at Farage’s politics suggests it isn’t. Farage has spoken out against interventionist wars abroad. He has also voiced his support for decriminalising recreational drugs. And he is supportive of Muslims integrating into British society. Such positions are hardly typical of a supposedly far-right politician.

Another charge against Farage made by his critics is that he wants to privatise the NHS. This may be his intention or not. But if it is, a true far-right fascist would surely seek to do the opposite: centralise the health service in order to monitor what kind of person is – and is not receiving – care, ensuring that foreigners don’t get access.

 

The Brexit Party also has representatives from across the political spectrum. One of its leading lights is Claire Fox, who for twenty years was an activist for the Revolutionary Communist Party.

 

What’s more, if recent polls are anything to go on, the party is backed by a third of the British population. Surely they can’t all be fascists. So clearly there is something awry at this ‘far-right’ name-calling.

It’s true that Farage has said some justly nasty things about Islamists. He has also made comments that are arguably open to misinterpretation about the Jewish financier George Soros. And Farage has spoken of the need for tougher borders.

But a fascist he is not. And if we call Nigel Farage ‘far right’ how do we describe the actual far right? You know, actual fascists and racists who would rather there were no Muslims in Britain at all. And would rather have no immigration at all than controlled immigration. Should they be known as the ultra-right? Right-wing extra? I Can’t Believe It’s Not Right Wing?

Applying the epithet ‘far-right’ to Farage – a man who now openly speaks out against his former party Ukip for being of that very ilk – is clearly absurd. It is also bound to backfire for those who chuck such an insult around.

Part of the blame for this name-calling lies with social media, a narcissistic and needy arena where people employ ever-more dramatic and fantastical language in order to draw attention to themselves in order to get likes and retweets. On Twitter, ‘far right’ is far more eye-catching than the more accurate ‘populist’.

 

A second factor is that hardcore Remain supporters have grown ever more panicky and furious at the prospect of a Brexit Party victory tomorrow. These people didn’t get their way in 2016 – and they will not get their way this week, making some incandescent that the masses are still refusing to change their minds about leaving the EU. For too many ardent Europhiles, this fury has resulted in them resembling Rick from The Young Ones, a character who also disparaged everyone vaguely objectionable as ‘fascist’.

 

When intelligent discourse is replaced by gestures like throwing milkshakes – apparently a commendable action in the eyes of some – it is a sign that one side is losing the argument.

 

‘Far right’ and ‘fascist’ have become part of the armoury used by Farage’s opponents to alarm and cajole the Brexit Party’s supporters – and the undecided. I suspect that most people will see through this desperate distortion of the English language.

 

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Spiked, April 19, 2019

Notre Dame: incarnation of civilisation
Without our history and collective memory, we are but animals.

Spiked, March 29, 2019

The BBC is institutionally Remainist
Working-class, pro-Leave voices are becoming ever-more rare.

The Catholic Herald, March 8, 2019

Diderot's self-centred rebellion
Patrick West on the 'utter scoundrel' of the Enlightenment Diderot and the Art of Free Thinking
By Andrew Curran,

Other Press, 320pp, £22/$29

The late, great, arch-reactionary Fr Jean-Marie Charles-Roux often began his sermons at St Etheldreda’s Church in Holborn, London, with a denunciation of that atheist figurehead of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot, best known as the editor of the landmark Encyclopédie. Diderot was an appropriate target because he was a fervent atheist in the way we understand the term today. For the most part, thinkers of the Enlightenment weren’t atheists. Voltaire, for example, was typical of this movement, being a Newtonian deist and non-Christian believer in some higher power, designer and creator.

The paradox is that, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Diderot came from an intensely religious family, with many ancestors who belonged to the clergy. Diderot even became an abbé himself in youth, before renouncing religion, not primarily for theological reasons. His rebellion was principally one against authority.

While so many philosophes had been driven to reject Christianity by having read Spinoza’s anti-Theist theology, Diderot “had an ingrained tendency both to chafe at authority and to question the ideas upon which authority is founded”, writes Andrew Curran. He was particularly horrified by the bitter squabble between the Jesuits and Jansenists, which he saw as a ludicrous and appalling, akin to Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the wars between the “big-enders” and “little-enders”.

It was this propensity to cock a snook at authority which led Diderot to include in his Encyclopédie under “Cannibals”, cross-references to “Altar”, “Communion” and “Eucharist”. There is something almost juvenile in doing so, in what was purported to be a serious compendium of knowledge and progress in the 18th century.

As Curran explains in this marvellous and eye-opening book, Diderot’s life story was more nuanced than the reader might assume. He is remembered for clashing with the Jesuit order on account of the Encyclopédie’s perceived irreligion and potentially corrosive influence. But there were liberal, intellectual Jesuits – “priests of letters” – who objected to the Encyclopédie not for its dangerous atheism, but because they weren’t included: they had assumed that they were going to contribute to the endeavour.

“While some historians who have written about the ‘battle of the Encyclopédie’ tend to assign the Jesuits to an ‘anti-Enlightenment’ group,’’ writes Curran, “the truth was that this Roman Catholic order of priests had long considered themselves key players in the scholarly arena.” These liberal Jesuits objected to the perception that the Enlightenment was a project diametrically opposed to traditional religion.

The hugely industrious Diderot contributed 7,000 articles to the Encyclopédie. And despite some schoolboy lapses of taste, most of his entries are sober and serious, addressing subjects such as anatomy, architecture, astronomy, clock-making, gardening, hydraulics, medicine, physics and surgery. By the time the Encyclopédie was finished in 1772, Diderot “had carried the ideas of the Enlightenment forward in a way that no person, not Voltaire, and certainly not Rousseau, had done”.

By this time, Diderot had largely abandoned writing and publishing under his own name, having been spooked by his arrest and incarceration in 1749. His later works on sexuality, race, theatre, morality and politics would not see the light of day in his own lifetime.

Despite Diderot’s erudition, Curran details what an utter scoundrel he was in real life. He was a serial adulterer, sponger, dilettante and swindler.

It was perhaps destiny that he should have befriended Rousseau. We should not be surprised that these two selfish reprobates eventually fell out. A final ignominy came in the 1790s when the protagonists of the French Revolution that he had inspired came to denounce his writings. Diderot’s atheism was deemed incompatible with Robespierre’s deism and notion of a Higher Being.

Although Diderot influenced subsequent thinkers such as Marx and Freud, he never achieved repute as one of the finest exemplars of the Enlightenment. He is not a literary great, unlike many of his contemporaries. Yet his thought does warrant him the place in posterity that he was so keen to achieve, and he deserves to be remembered alongside Voltaire and Montesquieu as one of the giants of his time. He spoke out against slavery at a time when abolitionism was in its infancy and was in favour of tolerance for gay people at a time when it was deeply unfashionable in France.

What is more, he remains relevant in 2019, in a Europe in which the notion of democracy has come into question. As Diderot put it: “There is no sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.”

Spiked, March 8, 2019

Michael Jackson - why do we believe his accusers?
There has been a cultural shift towards a presumption of guilt - and that should worry us all

The Spectator, February 16, 2019

Spiked, February 15, 2019

Yes, Brexit will be difficult...
But that's why we must pursue it

Spectator Coffee House, February 5, 2019

The EU’s damning silence on the gilet jaunes protests

 

On Saturday, there was another wave of Yellow Vest protests in France. The focus was not the price of diesel, the carbon tax, the cost of living or President Macron, as has been the norm, but police brutality and their use of rubber bullets.

Thousands took to the streets of Paris and elsewhere instead in a ‘march of the injured’, calling for a ban on police weapons that shoot 40mm rubber projectiles (the interior minister, Christophe Castaner, has acknowledged that the weapon, used more than 9,000 times since the beginning of the protests, could cause injuries.) An estimated 10,000 turned out at the Place de la Republique, where they were met with police tear-gas and water cannons. Clashes ensued between police and protesters.

Since the gilets jaunes first emerged in November, more than a dozen people have been grievously injured in weekly protests – losing their eyes, or having their hands and feet mutilated. According to the government’s own figures, at least 1,700 people have been injured in the months of conflict.

‘They shoot at the population with a weapon of war,’ said Jérôme Rodrigues, a prominent figure in the movement, who suffered a serious and permanent eye injury in Paris last month. ‘Is that what France is like today? We just want to fill the fridge and we end up losing an eye.’ YouTube and Twitter abound with videos of police brutality, with one much-viewed piece of footage which appears to show French police smashing a protestor’s head on the pavement.

Aïnoha Pascual, a Paris lawyer who has represented several of the injured by rubber bullets, including one who has had part of his hand ripped off, and another left partially deaf and with facial injuries, told the Guardian that she has never seen so many injuries during protests. ‘These weapons are a very real problem. In the 1980s, if one person was hit in the eye at a demonstration there would be a huge reaction, yet now there is no reaction from government.’

 

Meanwhile, last week a collective of lawyers petitioned the French government to ban golf-ball sized ‘sting-ball’ grenades, which contain 25g of TNT high-explosive. France is the only country in Europe where police use such high-power grenades, which issue stinging rubber balls loaded with teargas.

Elsewhere, France 3 reported on Friday that an investigation has been launched in Toulouse after officers were caught on tape saying they wanted to ‘shoot’ violent gilets jaunes protesters. In the footage, recorded at a police command room during a rally in the city on January 12, one officer is heard saying: ‘There’s one on the ground there.’ Another comments: ‘What a bunch of bastards!’
Trained riot police officers have blamed much of the police brutality on mobile units of plain-clothes anti-gang police, drafted in to help cope with the weekend protests by masked gilet jaunes. But whoever is to blame, the fact remains that these protests in France have been the longest-running and most violent in living memory.

The EU has so far failed to publicly denounce a power within it. It has remained silent for the same reason it failed to condemn Madrid after Spanish police beat up voters in Catalonia in 2017 following the region’s unofficial independence referendum. The EU also failed to condemn the simultaneous incarceration of Catalan separatist activists, nine of whom are still in prison. On Friday, thousands held a protest in Barcelona on their behalf.

The EU has failed to denounce Spanish state brutality because the Catalan independence movement could destabilise or even tear apart the Spanish state. This could have knock-on effects in Europe, giving succour to Flemish and Scottish separatist movements, and destabilising the EU itself.
The EU has similarly failed to speak out against the French state because the gilet jaunes not only imperil the stability of the pro-EU French government, but because most of their numbers are openly hostile to the EU. They are often pictured bearing placards calling for ‘Frexit’. They are symbolic of a Europe-wide revolt against a perceived remote and privileged elite, which they feel the EU embodies.

The gilets jaunes represent the pan-European, left-behind ‘somewhere’ people, the deplorables who resent what they see as a neoliberal, pro-immigration, big business-friendly ruling class – also personified by the EU. The EU’s silence over the maltreatment of people who live inside its borders in France will only cement this perception.

The EU leaders pay no attention to such abuses because its unaccountable politicians cannot be voted out. And in the end, their inaction will further antagonise those who see the EU as a self-serving, detached overlord, a body which is interested foremost and solely in its own self-preservation.

Spectator Coffee House, January 29, 2019

There’s nothing ‘elitist’ about kids following in their parents’ footsteps

　

Children of doctors are 24 times more likely than their peers to become doctors. Children of lawyers are 17 times more likely to go into law, and children of those in film or television are 12 times more likely to enter these fields. The same pattern is repeated in architecture and in the performing arts. These are the revelations announced in a new book, ‘The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged’, by Sam Friedman, a professor at the London School of Economics, and Daniel Laurison. The book sets out to explore the "helping hands" that allow the well-connected middle-classes to retain their domination in elite professions. Dr Friedman calls some of these figures "staggering". But are they really? Historically, they are nothing of the sort. After all, there is nothing remotely new, abnormal or "elitist" about children following in their parents’ footsteps when it comes to career choice.

The acting world abounds in Redgraves and Foxes, Fondas and Fairbankses. The broadcasting world has its Dimblebys and Snows. Politics has seen more than one Pitt, Churchill and Bush. When it comes to writing we can talk of Amis the father or son, just as we can with Waughs, Corens and Mounts. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus was an eminent natural philosopher. Pablo Picasso’s father was an artist. There was a whole host of musical Bachs.

It’s something we see in all classes. A nurse’s daughter is 3.75 times more likely to become a nurse than the rest of the population, according to a 2016 study. The research also revealed that a fifth of daughters whose mothers worked in offices and administrative support chose the same career, twice the usual rate, while a son who had a father in the military was five times more likely to enter the military. Sons of bakers and builders have traditionally become bakers and builders. That’s why the names of their businesses traditionally have the appendage "…& Sons." This is why we talk of "family butchers".

Farmer’s sons have historically become farmers. If you are immersed in the world of farming from the very beginning of your life, farming will be close to your heart, intrinsic to your identity. The same goes for children of actors, who will hear their parents talking about acting from infancy, meet other actors who have come round to visit, talk about acting to actors. A child of a journalist, who grows up with Radio 4 constantly and unrelentingly blaring in the background, in a home where the shelves heave with books on history, biography and literature, will one day pick up a copy of the many newspapers found lying on the kitchen table. And so the child’s fate is sealed.

Even Friedman admits the importance of this childhood immersion. "Who feels at age 14 that they are going to go on and be a doctor? It’s a pretty wild ambition. But if you’ve got a mum or dad normalising that world for you and saying it’s a distinct possibility, that’s quite emboldening," he told the Times on Saturday. Parents educate their children in the informal "rules of the game".

As David Grusky, sociology professor at Stanford university, and author of the study "It’s a decent bet that our children will be professors too", told the Financial Times in 2016, his own children were more likely to be academics because they’ve been "trained" from a very early age in the way professors "think, reason, and write". "Imagine the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse," Grusky said. "We can imagine the engineer’s family talked mainly about why the building failed structurally, whereas the sociologist’s family talked mainly about why there is terrorism."

This is not to say there isn’t something to be said for the existence of a "class ceiling". Friedman writes of the "inheritance of cultural capital" enjoyed by upper middle-class children. They speak and dress like those at the top of their chosen profession. Consequently they are more likely to have their careers fast-tracked by bosses. Working-class graduates of equal merit often lack the polished demeanour and confidence of their middle-class or upper-class peers, which can be a clincher in job interviews. (This problem could be remedied by teaching working-class pupils to speak with greater clarity, eloquence and confidence. But such a solution would face resistance on the grounds of "elitism".)

The real hindrance for children from working class families is that their parents are less able to subsidise that all-important period of work experience at the outset of their careers. But this is a consequence of a greater global phenomenon, of an era in which social mobility has decreased and inequality increased.

On the other hand, there remains nothing intrinsically odd or novel about children of doctors becoming doctors. It is the natural and historical way of the world.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Spiked, January 25, 2019

In defence of walls

Borders are about security, not exclusion.

Spectator Life, January 24, 2019

Tintin turns 90: the secret to his appeal
One-dimensional and decidedly un-PC, Hergé’s Tintin is a blank slate onto which we project our own desire for adventure

Spiked, January 11, 2019

Just say no to Veganuary
Veganism isn’t a diet – it’s a cult of purity.

Spiked, December 23, 2018

Nietzsche: an explosion in thought
Sue Prideaux has written a fine biography of this most misunderstood of thinkers.

Spiked, December 21, 2018

Leavers are the true cosmopolitans
Elite Remainers see immigrants as little more than economic units.