I’ve always felt a strong connection to the people in ITV’s long-running documentary series Seven Up! When it began, in 1964, they were seven and I was six. We’ve grown up together, had setbacks, successes, families, and lost friends and loved ones. The curtain comes down on Wednesday as they reach 70, and it feels emotional and sobering.
It’s emotional because we’ve all become old in the blink of an eye, and sobering because the show’s aim back in 1964 was to gauge the rigidity of the British class system and the result was inevitable.
Working-class boys Tony and Paul became a taxi driver and a bricklayer, while prep-school boys Andrew and John, who predicted when they were seven that they would go to a top public school, then Oxbridge, then become wealthy lawyers, did just that. Andrew’s kids went to public school, two of John’s friends became Cabinet ministers and so the cycle of privilege turned.
In 1964 it felt like class barriers were being torn down. Pop groups and actors with accents were shaking the Establishment and working-class kids were going to university. State school-educated Harold Wilson, who pledged “a new Britain”, replaced a stuffy Prime Minister who, like his two predecessors, had gone to Eton and Oxford.
But the class system absorbed the knocks of 60s liberalism and the equality-enhancing Labour governments and came back even stronger, as evidenced by the latest Sutton Trust report which showed how Britain’s most powerful people are still five times more likely to have been educated privately than in state schools.
While The Social Mobility Commission’s latest report concluded that “entrenched disadvantage” stretching back “50 years” was holding back the general population as the best jobs still mostly go to those from privileged backgrounds.
There’s no doubt the vast majority of us are better off than our parents were 60 years ago but school-leavers trying to reach the summit of top professions who aren’t perceived as One Of Us by the power-brokers will find it is just as prohibitive.
The gap between the rich and the poor in Britain is even wider today than it was in 1964, with the top 10% now owning 57% of the wealth. Indeed, the top 1% of the UK population has a greater share of national income than at any time since the 1930s.
Seven Up! has largely confirmed that class reproduction in Britain is incredibly resilient and it has proven its founding premise – “give me the child when he is seven and I will give you the man” – to be true. Then, as now, where you start in life still dictates, to a frightening degree, where you will end up.
And the proof is rubbed into our faces daily, although most of us appear programmed to accept it. Look where the King’s 13-year-old grandson started school this week. Not in the nearest decent state one but the £63,298-a-year Eton his father went to, where the British upper class dress in Victorian garb and pass on the baton of privilege.
None of us can be sure where all the kids starting in our local state school will end up but we know most of those joining Eton with Prince George will end up rich and powerful with one of them ruling us for no other reason than his place at the top of the class system. Sadly, in Britain, unless you’re born into wealth, the only way isn’t up.