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I used to really like Lucy Mangan. I identified with her tales of a northern childhood and a slightly awkward and eccentric family. Someone even paid me the compliment once of saying that my blog made her wonder whether I was Lucy Mangan's distant cousin. Praise indeed.
And then came this. Last weekend, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/10/mangan-inequality-dont-blame-oxbridge, Lucy Mangan wrote a declamation against the public school and Oxbridge elite, leaving me so lost for words that I became almost distressed. I'm seldom at such a loss, but this piece was just so full of angry vitriol that it left me quite bereft.
The article's premise is that people are born, essentially, into either of two backgrounds, very rich (privileged) or very poor (under-privileged); that the former go to public school and Oxbridge and do brilliantly, while the latter go to the local comp and fail. Government is made up of the privileged elite and the under-privileged simply flounder, unrepresented, disenfranchised even in a self-perpetuating system. So far, so typical anti-Tory mid-term polemic, but the manner in which the case was argued was bewildering.
First of all there were social stereotypes. Yes, there are the ridiculously over-privileged, born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths and the privately financed Harley Street consultant to remove it should it happen to get in the way. Yes, every town has difficult areas, and yes of course there are children growing up in appalling, dysfunctional neglect. But most grow up between these extremes, and it is here that Mangan's premise fails. In her semi-fictionalised, entertaining accounts of her own life, Lucy Mangan depicts a lower middle class upbringing in a northern household - much the same as my own. Whereas products of the Eton/Oxbridge stereotype are slapping one another one the back on government and opposition benches, there are possibly even more Honourable Members who negate it, with backgrounds and education similar to Lucy Mangan's or mine. The middle ground is no fun for a polemic, but a polemic is no good without a basis in sound argument, and this one simply drifts into cartoonish stereotype.
Then there was her depiction of Oxbridge life. I'm going to admit it: I studied at Oxford, and I loved it, but it's not the first thing I tell people about myself and I am secretly quite pleased that a lot of people are rather surprised when they find out. I certainly wasn't the typical Oxbridge 'type', but I fitted in as much as I ever have anywhere. It's hard to find out much about Lucy Mangan, apart from her carefully curated vignettes of family life, but a little excavation brought me to find that she read English at Cambridge. How interesting; how delightfully ironic, as while her vitriolic lambasting of schools like Eton, universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and politicians like Michael Gove and David Cameron who had benefited from such 'privilege' took shape, she herself partly owed her position as a Guardian columnist to a Cambridge education, and, before that, the sort of state school which combined with her own intelligence to allow her to access such a university. It's unfortunate that Mangan lambasts Michael Gove in an especially unpalatable image: Gove who, curiously enough, attended a state school, having been adopted in his infancy by a hard-working middle class family, not a silver spoon or a Harley Street specialist in sight...
The etymology of vitriol is a telling one. Oil of vitriol is the historical name for sulphuric acid, a hazardous, highly corrosive mineral acid, which can, in a concentrated state, cause burns or even permanent blindness; in more general terms vitriol is used to mean anything highly caustic or severe in effect, such as criticism.
Throwing sticks is a motif in Mangan's article. 'In some quadrangles,' she gloats, 'you cannot throw a stick without hitting an Old Etonian. This is what makes throwing sticks in quadrangles such fun'. The image returns like a boomerang, rallying readers: 'Pick a big stick and hurl it as hard as you like, by all means. But aim it at the Old Etonian in charge...' It's a well-known proverb that 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.' It's a proverb that I've always had my doubts about: sometimes a broken bone can hurt less than a litany of cruel words. And sometimes your own words can end up hurting you more than the very worst that others use against you.
When you're going to use words as caustic criticism, or to hurl sticks at an enemy, it's best to approach vitriol with the caution advised to prevent oneself from blindness.
Otherwise, the sticks and stones you hurl so vehemently may end up coming back to shatter the very bones behind your words.
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Mangan’s having been educated at Cambridge does not disqualify her from commenting on social inequities which she clearly states go beyond the question of Oxbridge. This post’s use of the term ‘delightfully ironic’ to qualify this revelation – writer with regular media platform educated at Oxbridge shock! – implies that its author takes peculiar pleasure in Mangan’s apparent hypocrisy. Well, maybe she is a hypocrite on a personal level – I don’t know her, so I can’t comment on that. But her personal hypocrisy, if it exists, has nothing to do with the validity or invalidity of the points made in her piece, which should be discussed on their own merits and not in terms of where she was educated. Once more: Oxbridge is not the issue.
Finally: in point of fact, the ever-noxious bumhole that is Gove attended the Robert Gordon College in Aberdeen, albeit on a scholarship. The fact that he was not born into privilege does not make his noxiousness – or that of the ideas he farts – any less eternal, any more than Mangan’s Cambridge education makes her comments on social inequities – whether Oxbridge-related or not, and here it is a case of mostly not – any less valid.
“The article’s premise is that people are born, essentially, into either of two backgrounds, very rich (privileged) or very poor (under-privileged); that the former go to public school and Oxbridge and do brilliantly, while the latter go to the local comp and fail.”
This is simply not in Mangan’s article, which makes a distinction between the broad middle class (upper, middle and lower) and those left behind by society, between haves and have-nots. She nowhere makes the claim that the former group go to public school and Oxbridge; she nowhere in this context discusses silver spoons or Harley Street. By this stage, most importantly, she has moved on from Oxbridge, whereas this post never seems to leave it.
Mangan’s article was a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek piece that simply doesn’t do what this post says it does.
This should have been apparent from the outset, where Mangan highlights the annual traditional furore about privately-educated dominance of Oxbridge. The implication is that this is an exercise in pointless hand-wringing, as the words ‘waste of time’ might well have indicated. Oxbridge is merely a rhetorical way in to the actual subject of the article.
Following a light-hearted and – above all – tongue-in-cheek gag about throwing sticks, Mangan’s main observation about Oxbridge is that ‘the dominance of such people [Old Etonians etc.] at these (and other) universities is unfair, inequitable and unconscionable.’ This is, of course, a matter of opinion, but it is a fairly uncontroversial claim. If by ‘such people’, Mangan is referring to the 7% of the UK population who are privately educated, then surely it is not unreasonable to suggest that the fact that this demographic accounts for almost half of Oxbridge undergraduates is in some sense inequitable. But this is a mere aside to the central thrust of Mangan’s piece.
[cont'd in next post]