Once you see it, you see it everywhere. In the BBC, in academia, in the arts and the civil service, in the minds of middle-class parents and on the opposition benches. It’s nebulous, shifting and insidious. For some years, this government has been at war with an invisible enemy, responsible for almost everything that is wrong with this country. Snobbery.
Take snobbery about vocational courses, a particularly stubborn political opponent. Education secretaries have been fighting it for decades. “I’m determined to tackle the minority of schools that perpetuate an outdated snobbery towards apprenticeships,” said Nicky Morgan in 2016. Her successor Damian Hinds was equally determined to thwart “opinion formers” who felt “vocational courses are for other people’s children”. Gavin Williamson, for his part, battled an “inbuilt snobbishness” from families who think their children should go to university as a “rite of passage”. And so on.
But snobbery isn’t the problem. A recent review of the UK’s apprenticeship scene finds almost half of those who sign up to these courses abandon them, disillusioned. Loopholes allow unscrupulous employers to hire them for dogsbody jobs, such as making tea, or go months without training them. And haphazard regulation is not the only issue. The other is economic reality. Britain’s best-paid jobs – in common with those of other countries – go to university graduates. But of course these sorts of problems are expensive to tackle. Fighting snobbery is cheap.
Snobbery, ministers find, is also deeply enmeshed with another of the country’s major issues: mental health. For a decade, Conservative health ministers have campaigned for mental health to be granted “parity of esteem” with physical health. This locates the problem somewhere in the minds of doctors, managers or the public – a bias to shift. Critics, meanwhile, have located it elsewhere: in the underfunded services themselves – but these are difficult to patch up. Campaigning against snobs is easier.
Snobbery gets everywhere. It is snobbery, Rishi Sunak said in April, that has created the UK’s maths problem. “We’ve got to change this anti-maths mindset,” he said. There was a “cultural sense” that it was OK to be bad at maths (perhaps the result, others went on to speculate, of a country snobbishly obsessed with the classics). But, back in material reality, schools are struggling to recruit enough maths teachers. Could this be the real source of the problem? Critics of government policy, strangely enough, tend to be snobs too. The definition expands to include them – they become part of the snob blob. Opponents of Brexit are snobs, looking down on the less well-educated who wanted to leave the European Union. Critics of a scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda are also snobs. Not only are they looking down on “ordinary people” who agree with the idea, they are disrespecting Rwanda itself. “I encourage all of my critics to actually visit Rwanda before they throw around incredibly prejudiced and snobbish opinions,” Suella Braverman has said. Rwanda is a “beautiful, welcoming country”.
Snobbery is a useful opponent to have. Unlike most policy problems, tackling it doesn’t cost anything. Everyone dislikes a snob, so your cause is guaranteed to be popular. Best of all, however long your war against it, you won’t be expected to make any progress. When your enemy is a vaguely defined collection of viewpoints held by an undisclosed number of people, you can go on fighting for years.
Snobbery is helpfully slippery. You can find it anywhere. The idea of a snob tends to conjure the image of someone atop a hierarchy, sneering down. But if you look hard enough you can actually find snobs at the bottom of a hierarchy, sneering up. All it takes to make a snob is the idea they might think they are better than you. Whether they are actually better off, say in material terms, ceases to matter. It can be snobbish, for example, to stand up for the poor. In May, Tory MP Lee Anderson claimed those who used food banks could not cook or budget properly. When this caused an angry backlash, Anderson’s critics were labelled snobs. “Anderson, a working-class former coal miner,” the academic Matthew Goodwin wrote, was the victim of “class snobbery” from an “elite group” of university graduates who viewed people like him with “open contempt”.
In December, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, came under fire for claiming striking teachers were “in the top 10% of earners” in some parts of the country, while herself owning a £10,000 Rolex. Her critics were guilty of inverted snobbery, Keegan said. They believed she should “never have made any money” and remained “working class”.
It can even be snobbish to want to improve things for women or minorities. The government’s “war on woke” ran on the concept it was somehow lofty and pretentious to campaign on behalf of those at the bottom of social hierarchies.
“Woke” police should “get back to basics”, Priti Patel declared last August, a few months before the jailing of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick. In March this year, a damning report found the Met “institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic”.
But most of all it can be snobbish to be a critic. Critics, by definition, think they have better ideas than you. Especially informed critics – who are then “intellectual snobs”. These are worst of all.
All this may explain a paradox: why a party explicitly comfortable with the idea of hierarchy seems to have such a problem with snobbery and elitism. It is a useful cover for other kinds of elite. “It should go without saying,” the cultural critic Mark Fisher once wrote, “that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.”
No one likes a snob. But there are worse things.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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