Shot through with dilettantism, sexual harassment and sherry
June 23, 2019 6:36 PM Subscribe
In the small, insular world of the British establishment, every so often a clique of people can exert an extraordinary influence. There is a curious parallel between the 1980s Oxford Tories and the 1930s Cambridge spies. [...] Admittedly, the comparison between the Cambridge and Oxford sets isn’t entirely fair: though both betrayed Britain’s interests to the benefit of Moscow, the Brexiters didn’t mean to.
Another user has very kindly sent me this link, which works:
https://unv.is/ft.com/content/85fc694c-9222-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2
If the mods are comfortable replacing the original with this link, then please do - otherwise feel free to delete the post.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:12 PM on June 23, 2019 [8 favorites]
https://unv.is/ft.com/content/85fc694c-9222-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2
If the mods are comfortable replacing the original with this link, then please do - otherwise feel free to delete the post.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:12 PM on June 23, 2019 [8 favorites]
The second link works- and I think it’s an article well worth discussing.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:36 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:36 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
What a great read!
I already knew there were similarities, of course, but what was shocking is just how much of this could describe the University of Sydney today, from the union operation, the stupol hacks filling CVs, the newspaper politics, just everything about it really.
It's both absolutely disgusting - it makes you feel dirty to get involved with student politics, but also absurdly exhilarating. I'm no fool, I know student politics is often fairly irrelevant to many, but when I know one of the three Tory pricks sitting across the chamber will probably be PM one day it doesn't feel like it's completely irrelevant.
I have gone through the old USyd archives, and there too you can read articles from our own PMs when they were just starting off on their courses of assholery. The same edition that details the police brutality of the 1978 Mardis Gras has a piece from Tony Abbott denouncing the women's collective as misandrist political lesbians, and foreshadowing much of his shitty politics.
On one hand I hate it all, because it seems like it produces much of the dysfunctional behaviour of our politicians, but it's also very much a training ground. Even for those of us who don't want to support a political party, it teaches you to run campaigns, delegate tasks within that, look at polling, make preference deals, decide how you achieve things when you're forced to compromise and what comprises won't weaken your future position, when you can delay something using procedure, filibuster, etc, and when that'll backfire.
I will say, I don't know how they ever managed to run a campaign every 8 weeks, and whether you could ever get anything done in that time frame. I guess uni was easier then if they had 0-hours weeks, and they're probably not working, but it absolutely drains everyone here having a single yearly election for the student union, and I don't know how you'd play hardball with a university administration which knows you're gone in two months.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:37 PM on June 23, 2019 [7 favorites]
I already knew there were similarities, of course, but what was shocking is just how much of this could describe the University of Sydney today, from the union operation, the stupol hacks filling CVs, the newspaper politics, just everything about it really.
It's both absolutely disgusting - it makes you feel dirty to get involved with student politics, but also absurdly exhilarating. I'm no fool, I know student politics is often fairly irrelevant to many, but when I know one of the three Tory pricks sitting across the chamber will probably be PM one day it doesn't feel like it's completely irrelevant.
I have gone through the old USyd archives, and there too you can read articles from our own PMs when they were just starting off on their courses of assholery. The same edition that details the police brutality of the 1978 Mardis Gras has a piece from Tony Abbott denouncing the women's collective as misandrist political lesbians, and foreshadowing much of his shitty politics.
On one hand I hate it all, because it seems like it produces much of the dysfunctional behaviour of our politicians, but it's also very much a training ground. Even for those of us who don't want to support a political party, it teaches you to run campaigns, delegate tasks within that, look at polling, make preference deals, decide how you achieve things when you're forced to compromise and what comprises won't weaken your future position, when you can delay something using procedure, filibuster, etc, and when that'll backfire.
I will say, I don't know how they ever managed to run a campaign every 8 weeks, and whether you could ever get anything done in that time frame. I guess uni was easier then if they had 0-hours weeks, and they're probably not working, but it absolutely drains everyone here having a single yearly election for the student union, and I don't know how you'd play hardball with a university administration which knows you're gone in two months.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:37 PM on June 23, 2019 [7 favorites]
What stands out for me is the description of Oxford as a training ground for glib plausibility, a finishing school for the poshest of posh chancers. An excellent education for modern politics and media in the Anglosphere, perhaps. I've always been good at bullshit pretence and confidence, I just hadn't considered its role in enabling one to rule.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:01 PM on June 23, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:01 PM on June 23, 2019 [8 favorites]
The Oxford Union Society is a debating society; unlike the student unions or SRCs on Australian campuses it doesn't purport to represent the students' interests. That role is filled by the Oxford University Student Union. According to Wikipedia the actual management of the Oxford Union is performed by professional staff, so the frequent elections probably don't have much effect.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:10 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:10 PM on June 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Ah, thanks, I see what I missed now, and the Labourites being in the OUSU makes sense then.
I still maintain the resemblance is both striking and stomach-turning. The debating society is of course, a gathering point for many of the least passionate, most ambitious and venal people even amongst the questionable population that makes up stupol and media hacks.
Although there's a couple of good commies in there, to be fair. gods willing and the creek don't rise, they won't end up hypocritical melts like most of the Labor graduates.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:42 PM on June 23, 2019
I still maintain the resemblance is both striking and stomach-turning. The debating society is of course, a gathering point for many of the least passionate, most ambitious and venal people even amongst the questionable population that makes up stupol and media hacks.
Although there's a couple of good commies in there, to be fair. gods willing and the creek don't rise, they won't end up hypocritical melts like most of the Labor graduates.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:42 PM on June 23, 2019
This does a lot to explain Brexit.
This stood out to me:
Politicians from 1980s Oxford dominated both the Remain and Leave camps, but they were divided by the subject of their degrees. Oxford’s “prime minister’s degree” is PPE[16]: politics, philosophy, economics. It has often been associated with the Brexiters. Ivan Rogers[17], for instance, a grammar schoolboy in 1980s Oxford and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned “a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial-level plausible bullshit, supreme self-confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do . . . ”
Yet in fact in 2016 the PPEists were almost all Remainers: Cameron, Hunt, Stewart, Philip Hammond, Matt Hancock, Sam Gyimah, Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Balls, Cooper and Peter Mandelson. They had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a modern country. (Fatefully, the one great PPEist Leaver was the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell and a Labour Club member.)
By contrast, most Brexiters had studied backward-looking subjects: Classics for Johnson, History for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and English Literature (which mostly meant the canon) for Gove. They were nostalgics. Hence Johnson’s hagiography of Churchill and Rees-Mogg’s much-mocked recent paean The Victorians, while Gove as education secretary strove to make sure pupils learnt 19th-century literature and Britain’s “island story”.
A university education isn't the end of life, and I've always rather liked that you aren't stuck to your degree in the Anglo-Saxon system as much as in Continental Europe, but these people literally started out knowing nothing about politics or economy, and then they never learnt anything. It's scary.
posted by mumimor at 2:40 AM on June 24, 2019 [10 favorites]
This stood out to me:
Politicians from 1980s Oxford dominated both the Remain and Leave camps, but they were divided by the subject of their degrees. Oxford’s “prime minister’s degree” is PPE[16]: politics, philosophy, economics. It has often been associated with the Brexiters. Ivan Rogers[17], for instance, a grammar schoolboy in 1980s Oxford and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned “a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial-level plausible bullshit, supreme self-confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do . . . ”
Yet in fact in 2016 the PPEists were almost all Remainers: Cameron, Hunt, Stewart, Philip Hammond, Matt Hancock, Sam Gyimah, Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Balls, Cooper and Peter Mandelson. They had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a modern country. (Fatefully, the one great PPEist Leaver was the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell and a Labour Club member.)
By contrast, most Brexiters had studied backward-looking subjects: Classics for Johnson, History for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and English Literature (which mostly meant the canon) for Gove. They were nostalgics. Hence Johnson’s hagiography of Churchill and Rees-Mogg’s much-mocked recent paean The Victorians, while Gove as education secretary strove to make sure pupils learnt 19th-century literature and Britain’s “island story”.
A university education isn't the end of life, and I've always rather liked that you aren't stuck to your degree in the Anglo-Saxon system as much as in Continental Europe, but these people literally started out knowing nothing about politics or economy, and then they never learnt anything. It's scary.
posted by mumimor at 2:40 AM on June 24, 2019 [10 favorites]
For future reference: The FT allows you to read a certain number of articles a month for free if you come to them via a Google search link. So in this case putting "How Oxford university shaped Brexit — and Britain’s next prime minister" into the search box should give you a working link.
posted by tomp at 5:23 AM on June 24, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by tomp at 5:23 AM on June 24, 2019 [3 favorites]
Great read.
posted by sallybrown at 8:55 AM on June 24, 2019
posted by sallybrown at 8:55 AM on June 24, 2019
What stands out for me is the description of Oxford as a training ground for glib plausibility, a finishing school for the poshest of posh chancers. An excellent education for modern politics and media in the Anglosphere, perhaps. I've always been good at bullshit pretence and confidence, I just hadn't considered its role in enabling one to rule.
Not just Oxford but the system that leads up to it. I've estimated in the past that over the course of my secondary education, I probably had to speak in a formal context for almost an hour a day once you add up class discussions, seminars, 1:1 discussions with teachers, etc. That's a huge amount and it produces verbal fluency that can dazzle and baffle easily. Critically, most people who can't speak that way assume that there is a link between verbal fluency and intelligence. There probably is, but people from this background have been so comprehensively hothoused to be great speakers that they come across much cleverer than they actually are.
Interesting point about the PPE although I would treat that as a double sided coin. The traditional criticism of the PPE has been that in many cases it produces shallow thinkers who know just enough to justify the status quo but don't actually understand enough say, economics, to do anything new or radical. That is not incompatible with their Brexit stance, the conventional safe decision was always to remain and the fact that I and many other people here may believe that it was right decision for reasons that are *not* shallow, self-serving, steady-as-she-goes establishmentarianism does not mean that they were all principled pro-Europeans or trade experts. A stopped clock etc...
posted by atrazine at 9:33 AM on June 24, 2019 [8 favorites]
Not just Oxford but the system that leads up to it. I've estimated in the past that over the course of my secondary education, I probably had to speak in a formal context for almost an hour a day once you add up class discussions, seminars, 1:1 discussions with teachers, etc. That's a huge amount and it produces verbal fluency that can dazzle and baffle easily. Critically, most people who can't speak that way assume that there is a link between verbal fluency and intelligence. There probably is, but people from this background have been so comprehensively hothoused to be great speakers that they come across much cleverer than they actually are.
Interesting point about the PPE although I would treat that as a double sided coin. The traditional criticism of the PPE has been that in many cases it produces shallow thinkers who know just enough to justify the status quo but don't actually understand enough say, economics, to do anything new or radical. That is not incompatible with their Brexit stance, the conventional safe decision was always to remain and the fact that I and many other people here may believe that it was right decision for reasons that are *not* shallow, self-serving, steady-as-she-goes establishmentarianism does not mean that they were all principled pro-Europeans or trade experts. A stopped clock etc...
posted by atrazine at 9:33 AM on June 24, 2019 [8 favorites]
Brexit always had an air of being improvised on the spot, but foolish me thought there had to be a plan at its core.
posted by tommasz at 2:31 PM on June 24, 2019
posted by tommasz at 2:31 PM on June 24, 2019
Brexit always had an air of being improvised on the spot, but foolish me thought there had to be a plan at its core.
Well, this car crash interview very much feels like someone “rubbing along on no hours per week”
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:11 PM on June 24, 2019
Well, this car crash interview very much feels like someone “rubbing along on no hours per week”
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:11 PM on June 24, 2019
To judge from my Twitter feed the Johnson campaign is engaged in so many car crash interviews it's beginning to resemble the climax to The Blues Brothers. Will it make any difference, though?
posted by Grangousier at 3:44 AM on June 25, 2019
posted by Grangousier at 3:44 AM on June 25, 2019
This obituary of abusive vile right wing historian Norman Stone in today's Guardian seems like it belongs here. Cambridge managed to sack him only because Oxford recruited him, and they apparently then paid him off until retirement age once he'd exceeded his threshold of awfulness.
My parents went to Oxford, as did my grandfathers and great grandfathers. I could never understand why they didn't want that for their children, and especially why they sent us to the most run down comprehensive in the neighbourhood.
I think this is amongst the first times I understand that.
posted by ambrosen at 7:23 AM on June 25, 2019 [3 favorites]
My parents went to Oxford, as did my grandfathers and great grandfathers. I could never understand why they didn't want that for their children, and especially why they sent us to the most run down comprehensive in the neighbourhood.
I think this is amongst the first times I understand that.
posted by ambrosen at 7:23 AM on June 25, 2019 [3 favorites]
They were part of an empire ruled by emperors, and became a kingdom ruled by kings, now they're a country...
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:30 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:30 AM on June 26, 2019 [2 favorites]
« Older Judith Krantz (1927-2019) | Content Moderation Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Unless anyone knows a way around the FT’s paywall (no luck with archive.org and google cache) then this post appears to be a non-starter.
What a shame, as the article is great. :(
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:04 PM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]