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Quentin Letts: "All men are not equal"

Tin helmets on, gang. I have just written a book in praise of elitism. In the Britain of Ed Balls, this may seem rash. Comrade Balls and his cruel-voiced Madame Lovely, Yvette Cooper, regard elitists with the fury that Chairman Mao’s ruffians once treated poets. And yet it had to be done – a book which argues that ‘social climbers’ such as the TV sitcom character Hyacinth Bucket are an example to us all. The more I thought about the Britain of Balls and Cooper, and the more I saw the shrivelling of beauty and the coarsening of manners. And the more I felt I had to urge you readers of Cherwell to embrace the idea that you are among the best and the brightest and that you should cherish your excellence.

All men are not equal. Some are born stronger than others and it is their duty to help the infirm. They will not do this by hiding like milksops. Leaders do not galvanise a frail citizenry by trembling behind matron and saying “ooh, I’m no better than anyone else”. False modesty debilitates a society.   Inequality exists, full stop. A few people are good at maths, many not; some have a flair for carpentry, others are no more able to assemble an Ikea table than the Masai warrior, plucked from his mud hut, knows how to play chopsticks on the piano. Unfairness – and, with it, a sense of gradation – is inevitable. The silliest response is to try to deny this truth. The second silliest response is to suggest that low grade is somehow more desirable.

Our rulers celebrate the crass and the grotty by flattening their accents, coarsening our culture, by jumping down in the gutter with the thick and the violent, the sexually incontinent, the drugged, the criminal, vexatious, cruel, indolent, selfish and unpatriotic. In doing this, our elite thought it was doing the decent thing. Alas, it was simply betraying the very people it aspired to help: the ambitious, blameless poor.

We are losing the idea of citadel, a notion of what is best and what is worth acquiring. Having reached Oxford University, you are part of that citadel. Be proud of what you have achieved. Try to conduct yourselves in a proper manner. Puff out your chests, by all means, and walk tall. But walk straight, too. Walk with honour. Commissions, working parties, think tanks, steering committees, conferences, charities, consultancies: egalitarianism has become an industry for the self-righteous, a largely secularist employment belt whose own high priests think themselves unbelievably important. In the past 20 years it has grown beyond anything envisaged by the socialist Fabians or even by their communist cousins. If the dotty old Webbs, Beatrice and Sidney, came back to Britain today they would be horrified by this behemoth of privileged paddlers. They would ask: where is the good, here, for our poor? The equality world has become a self-feeding monster, a job creation scheme for the clerical caste.

From university admissions to unisex hospital wards, equality runs like ground elder, strangling common sense. Officialdom towers over us, wagging its disapproval, instructing us to observe equality codes or face the withdrawal of public funds. Even the selection of candidates for our Parliament might have to comply with equality edicts, single-sex selection lists already being in operation in some parts of the system.  The language heard on airwaves is smudged by egalitarian neurosis. The content of our museums, the plays staged at our theatres, even our sporting ideals – all these quake before the great god equality, the constant, highly politicised impetus toward populism – in short, bog-standardism.

Despite all this, equality has not achieved its aims. Social mobility is dropping. The wealth divide broadens. “Equality practitioners”, as they call themselves, have simply become a new super-pod, brahmins amid the beggars, sixth form monitors of thought who draw their salaries from the pockets of the very poor they profess to help. No less an egalitarian than Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s malevolent henchman, once referred in a loose off-drive to “bog standard comprehensives”. Bog Standard Britain. You said it. Mate.

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