People Like Us – N Δ T H Δ N S Δ M U E L

By Hashi Mohamed

Rating: **/5

Eenoch powell ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech to his local Birmingham Conservative Association,

Quotes and Personal Highlights

‘blue blood’ comes from a Spanish term, sagre azul, ‘coined in the late 1500s to distinguish between the racially superior white Christian nobility (with pale skin revealing blue veins) and the Jews, Muslims and West Africans whom Europeans were increasingly ousting from their continent.’4

‘but where are you from really?’ often stems from curiosity rather than hostility, and probably seems fairly harmless to the questioner: but it reveals the underlying assumption that, regardless of whether you’ve said Croydon or Leeds or Portsmouth, you’re really from somewhere else; you don’t belong here. But when you do go back to visit the homelands, whether that’s Somalia or Pakistan, Ghana or Jamaica, the chances are that you’ll feel like a foreigner there too. You won’t speak the language, and you won’t fit into the culture. You don’t fit in here, and you don’t fit in in Blighty either.

‘England’, George Orwell wrote, ‘is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.’ And it is certainly true that class pervades every aspect of British society: it shapes the lives of its members in ways that are both profound and ordinary, from their life expectancy to their brand of teabags. It is both strictly codified and somewhat vague, although many British people will have internalised it to such an extent that they will reflexively be able to ‘sort’ a stranger by such details as where they live, what they order in the pub, and what sort of dog they have. I find these complex webs of taboos and rules, of unspoken agreements and secret codes, endlessly fascinating, sometimes funny and often infuriating. It took me, for example, a long time to work out that when someone from an upper-class background talked of ‘having been at school near Slough’ or owning ‘a little cottage in the country’, they did not mean that their school was near Slough or that they were the owner of a small dwelling in a rural location: they meant that they went to Eton and have a second home in the Cotswolds or Cornwall, probably quite a big one with an orchard or a pool. As Orwell pointed out, to outsiders these rules can seem impenetrable, and the divisions so subtle as to be invisible: ‘Somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. … Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.’

‘genetics can only play a significant role for children’s educational attainment if their environmental opportunities are relatively equal.’ In other words, how much an influence or role our genetic make-up plays is largely dependent on whether we are all on the same footing to start off with.

‘The very concept of the royal family is the antithesis of diversity.’

32 There’s also some evidence that a kind of structural prejudice is at play. A 2015 study found that teachers were more likely to underestimate intelligence in disadvantaged children, and many children felt that the school did not allow them to forge strong relationships with adults in authority.

a dystopia. Young’s enormously influential book on the subject The Rise of the Meritocracy, was published in 1958.

a US study showed that by the age of four ‘a child from a professional family will hear 45 million words, a working-class child 26 million, and a child on welfare only 13 million’, a gap of 30 million words.

After all, there’s no point blaming societal issues, lack of resources, structural inequality and so on if your fate was sealed when you were born.

am absolutely convinced that most people, although they want the best for themselves and their children, also want a fairer society. These two objectives can sometimes be mutually exclusive, and people often see the question of access as a zero-sum game, that opening up a place for those from deprived communities will inevitably mean a place lost for another family’s child.

as important factor – luck. Luck: a term that is hard to define and impossible to quantify. Although it can sometimes appear like a bolt from the blue – a chance meeting, a misdirected letter – in general, luck is the relationship between a set of circumstances, hard work and the right opportunity at the right time. We have to be in a position to seize the opportunity when it arrives, but luck always has as much to do with factors beyond our control as within it, and it’s often only possible to appreciate its effect on our daily lives with the benefit of hindsight.

Black boys – who are statistically more likely to underachieve at school – are victims of this in particular. Usually, something relatively minor is blown out of proportion, in order to build a spurious case against a child so as to exclude them. Conversely, children who are appallingly behaved but gifted will be kept around because it’s thought that they’ll go on to do well in exams, and – regardless of the effect on the other pupils – that’s ultimately perfect for the statistics. This is happening in many state schools across England.39 Exclusions matter in the context of social mobility because, as you might suspect, they disrupt children’s schooling.

but I couldn’t understand why people worked so hard to achieve great success, and deservedly so, and yet, when it came to enjoying the fruits of that labour, would cloak it in layer upon layer of self-effacement and false modesty.

But looking at these ‘risk factors’ separately is misleading. It’s only when we put them all together that we can see that, as one researcher calculated, ‘A black Caribbean boy eligible for free school meals who also has special educational needs (SEN) is 168 times more likely to be permanently excluded than a white British girl without SEN and not eligible for FSM.’38 This is what the statistics and studies tell us.

But there is a strong correlation between single parenthood and poverty: a report by the charity Gingerbread in 2018 found that a third of single-parent families where the parent was working were living in poverty, the highest level in twenty years. And the ‘single parent’ referred to is almost always a mother – over 90 per cent of single parents are women.

But to talk about failing state schools and the exclusions of poor black boys from mainstream education is to address only half of the question. There are around 2,600 private schools in the UK, educating 625,000 children, or around 6.5 per cent of the total school-age population (7 per cent in England).41 If this seems like a relatively minor proportion of school leavers, then consider what those children go on to do: they form 74 per cent of high court judges, 71 per cent of senior military officers, 51 per cent of solicitors and journalists, 61 per cent of senior doctors,42 and 29 per cent of MPs.43 In the creative industries things are no different: 67 per cent of British Oscar winners were privately educated, as were 42 per cent of BAFTA winners, and a (relatively egalitarian) 19 per cent of Brit Award winners. When the newly appointed prime minister Boris Johnson appointed a new cabinet in July 2019, it was announced as the ‘most diverse in history’. Not in educational background: 67 per cent of its members were privately educated, and 37 per cent had attended private school and Oxbridge.44 But while we’re familiar with these statistics, we seem unable to really respond to them: something about them prevents us from addressing the astonishing, paralysing unfairness of the society they represent. As Alan Bennett put it: If, unlike the Daily Mail, one

By coincidence, the profession that I have chosen is one in which the link between parents and children is particularly strong: the children of lawyers are seventeen times more likely to become lawyers than are children not connected to the profession.

Class barriers are also consciously and unconsciously enforced by individuals who conform to certain rules, or who stick to codes on how ‘people like them’ ought to behave, look or even think.

Dina Nayeri, whose family moved first to England and then to America as refugees from Iran in the 1980s, picked out the exhausting contradictions and constraints faced by immigrants in their new countries in her book The Ungrateful Refugee: ‘The refugee has to be less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place. That’s the only way gratitude will be accepted.’ On the one hand, the refugee or immigrant must not compete with her new countrymen, must stay in a position of humble gratitude to the people who took her in. But if you’re too dependent you become a scrounger, a parasite: as Nayeri says, ‘one can go around in this circle forever, because it contains no internal logic. You’re not enough until you’re too much. You’re lazy until you’re a greedy interloper.’

I will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 3, but the short story is this: there is only so much the education system can do to balance the scales when so much of the damage to a poor child’s chances has already been done by the time they start school. By the age of five – the point at which children start school in the UK – children born into poverty are already a year behind the expected level of development. In the long term, children from deprived backgrounds who score highly on cognitive tests at twenty-two months fall behind peers from higher socio-economic groups, and while children of wealthy and educated parents who score poorly initially tend to catch up, those from poorer groups fail to do so. The damage sustained is long term. According to the authors of the study, ‘There is no evidence that entry into schooling reverses this pattern.’30 Of course,

In fact, one of the most remarkable things about social mobility and education is the intractable nature of this attainment gap, the final nail in the coffin of the ‘great leveller’. As previously mentioned, a cruel paradox is at work: although not being educated curtails your chance of social mobility, being educated doesn’t guarantee it either. Even when young people do everything that is asked of them – stay in school, get good A Levels, beat the odds to get into a Russell Group university – they still lag behind better-off fellow students and are nearly 25 per cent less likely to get a 2:1 or a first. Even if their time at university is stunningly successful, it won’t necessarily translate into the same benefits that students from privileged backgrounds enjoy: in The Class Ceiling, Friedman and Laurison note that even between graduates of the same university, with the same degree, there is a ‘class pay gap’, and graduates from well-off backgrounds but unimpressive degrees still did better professionally than working-class graduates with firsts.18 Clearly, education cannot bear the weight of expectation that is placed on it. *

In his book Dream Hoarders, the writer and former government adviser Richard Reeves points out a phenomenon known as ‘opportunity hoarding’. Because these days social mobility generally means relative, rather than absolute, mobility, there are only a limited number of places at the top. Conferring an advantage on your own child, therefore, probably means that another child will miss out. And a lot of middle- and upper-class parenting is – consciously or unconsciously – about opening up opportunities for their children, which, eventually, will put that child on the inside track to success, wealth and status. An extreme example is the college admissions scandal, code-named

In many ways, social mobility is about delayed gratification: transforming your life means hard graft, sacrifice, and waiting what could be years for everything to pay off. Young boys, and, increasingly, girls, who are excluded from school are pushed out of an institution that could help them make sense of their lives, and are likely to find that meaning instead on the streets: in dealing drugs, in gangs that provide them with an identity and status – and in the instant gratification of making transformative amounts of money. Gang members are five times more likely to have been excluded from school; and are almost twice as likely to have some sort of emotional, social or mental health problem.40 Social mobility is primarily a matter of fulfilment and opportunities, but it is occasionally also a matter of life and death: as the epidemic of knife and gun crime among young people continues, the same event that deprives them of the opportunity to better their lives also puts them at risk of losing it altogether.

In November 2013, Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, gave a speech on the subject of meritocracy. ‘It is surely relevant to a conversation about equality’, he said, ‘that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130.’ Of course, he said, he wasn’t suggesting that everyone in the clever 2 per cent was getting a fair deal, and he suggested some educational reforms to make it easier for them: ‘The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.’

In the British legal profession, unlike many jurisdictions around the world, lawyers are split into two types: barristers and solicitors. Solicitors are to law what general practitioners are to medicine; barristers are its surgeons. Solicitors meet the client first, identify the issue, advise, prepare legal documents and may also take matters to trial (as ‘solicitor-advocates’). But if your solicitor can’t resolve your problem – and especially if it looks like you’ll end up in court

It’s a terrible story, but, again, a remarkably unremarkable one: pick any Somali who arrived in Britain in the 1990s and they’ll tell you a similar tale. Decades later, the legacy of this trauma – exacerbated both by a lack of available help and a reluctance on the part of the community to seek it – is still deeply felt, in wounds that manifest themselves in myriad ways, from mental health problems to family rifts, from poor school results to gang membership. Being black and Muslim in Britain is not easy, nor is being a refugee, nor starting out as a recent immigrant in a context of abject poverty, little continuity with the past, and a sense of extreme precariousness. Some of us have been lucky enough to strike out beyond the survival zone and thrive. Others continue their gentle

It’s an exchange that represents our mutual frustration at how simplistic the discussion about social mobility has become over the years. In the UK, there are several narratives we employ when we think about social mobility – different models, if you like, for how people can do ‘better’. One is the ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ storyline, beloved of self-made millionaires, where your own hard work and vision take you from rags to riches. It’s an account that all too often omits crucial details, details that would place the story in its rightful context and would undermine the idea that all that is needed is hard work and dedication. Another model contends that intrinsic value is recognised and cherished early on – when a child from a deprived background wins a scholarship to Eton, for instance, this is often how it is framed.9 But perhaps the most deeply entrenched model is the one in which an earlier generation slaves and sacrifices so that their children can do what they themselves could not: social mobility as a shared project carried out over decades.

It’s not the white working class who make people with African and Asian-sounding surnames send in twice as many CVs; it’s not the white working class who award white British graduates nearly three times as many firsts as Black British graduates; it’s not the white working class who have eliminated targets for child poverty, which is highest among British Bangladeshi and Pakistani households; and it’s not the white working class who design budgets that make the poorest Black and Asian women some £2,000 worse off, and the wealthiest white men slightly better off.19

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see who’s at risk: the overwhelming majority (78 per cent) of permanent exclusions are boys, and they were more likely to be excluded at a younger age than girls. A special educational need also puts you at risk: to be precise, it makes you eight times more likely to be permanently excluded from school. Ethnic minorities are more likely to be expelled than white children: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children have the highest rates of exclusion, with black Caribbean pupils being the next in line.36 As children get older, matters tend to get worse.

Many parents are desperate that their children don’t fall behind or miss out on opportunities – and the pressure is often either transferred to teachers and schools, or channelled (by those who have the financial resources) into tutoring, summer camps and other methods of nudging children to the front of the pack. And it’s impossible

None of us is just one thing: all of us are composed of constellations of overlapping identities that together form ‘who we are’. We might see ourselves simultaneously as a brother, a fiancé, an uncle, a Liverpool fan, a bookworm, a graduate, a petrolhead, a Scouser, a Virgo, a millennial … the list is potentially endless. But over all these infinite variations loom two great categories that shape our identities and our futures like no other in modern Britain: race and class. ‘England’, George

Professor Alison Pilnick put it like this. ‘Any individual may succeed, but whether they do so or not is the result of their biological endowments rather than’ their economic or social resources. This transmission of ‘good’ genes by the genetically advantaged and successful to their children – something that’s fairly likely because ‘successful people tend to have children with people of the same status’ – means that the social hierarchy is the ‘natural result of biological differences rather than differences in access to cultural or material resources’. This leads inevitably to certain conclusions: that inequalities in society are the direct result of an individual’s inherited traits, and that ‘social inequalities are both inevitable and fair, because they are natural’.14 But this is, in my view, both a convenient untruth and a fundamental error of logic: it is the same mistake that Galton and his followers made, and for the same reasons. When Galton plotted out his elite pedigrees, he was guilty of a basic scientific error, that is seeking to prove a hypothesis that he already believed in. As Mukherjee notes, ‘his anxieties about class and status were so deep that he could not bear the thought that his own “intelligence” might merely be the by-product of privilege and opportunity.’

research into social mobility has shown that nothing has a more profound impact on your destination than your starting point.

So, without holding myself up as an example (in fact, the reverse – I want you to learn from my mistakes), this book aims to explain the hurdles I have overcome, identifying the personal and individual steps required for a social mobility journey, but outlining, too, the institutional barriers I have crossed (a more arduous process than it should have been).

some extent the anxiety is well justified: education does open doors. In 2015, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found that ‘if the head of a British household holds A-Level qualifications, they are 20 per cent more likely to exit poverty and 25 per cent less likely to re-enter it’. Likewise, it would be ridiculous not to acknowledge that almost all elite professions require a (good) degree, which means staying in school and getting (good) A Levels. And even if you don’t want to be a doctor or advertising executive, almost all jobs will require at least a C grade in maths and English at GCSE (something that in 2017 half of all students in England failed to achieve).

That your family situation can shape your confidence growing up is self-evident. If you recall the research of the sociologist Annette Lareau discussed in Chapter 1, you’ll recall that wealthier parents were more likely to talk things through with their children. They reasoned with them, expected them to talk back, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority.12 In contrast, poorer parents found interacting with authority intimidating and preferred to stay in the background.

the fact remains that, between 2004 and 2017, the foreign-born population in the UK nearly doubled, increasing from around 5.3 million to just under 9.4 million. Consequently, this has meant that Britain has become more diverse, with the number of people in England and Wales who identified as ‘White British’ falling by 7 per cent between the 2001 and 2011 censuses.2 This still left a country that was overwhelmingly white, however (especially as some of the shortfall was made up by immigration from ‘White Other’ groups): 80.5 per cent of the UK population is White British, and the next largest ethnic group, Asians, make up 7.5 per cent of the population, followed by black ethnic groups at 3.3 per cent.

These experiences, I believe, are common to many immigrant communities. And the situation is compounded by the fact that young second-generation immigrants are not only told by their families that their ‘real’ home is not the country where they were born and brought up, but also that the quiet drumbeat of not-quite-belonging is matched by an insistent narrative from the rest of society, which also tells them that they don’t really belong here, that, yes, perhaps they should ‘go back home’. In this way, British children, born and raised in this country, are repeatedly told, by society, by their own family, by the national media, by their own daily experiences, that this is not their home. Even someone like me – a ‘success story’, a higher-rate taxpayer, an Oxford graduate, a member of an elite profession – is often reminded in subtle, and (if I were to be generous), unintentional ways, that I don’t quite belong here.

They pay for private education. They hand over flat deposits. They fund their offspring when, as new graduates, they take on the unpaid internships that are the gateway to many industries – and they get out the address book to see who could help Sophie or Oliver get their foot in the door of their chosen career. To that end, to borrow a phrase coined by former government adviser Richard Reeves, they construct a ‘glass floor’ below which their children cannot fall. This is the missing and unspoken link in this whole debate.

To me, the real question is: who gets the chance to develop their genetic potential? And who is shielded from the consequences of theirs?

We eat up stories of poor children who made good through hard work and brains: when Brampton Manor, a state school in South London, announced that forty-one of its pupils had secured places at Oxford and Cambridge, it made headlines across the country. Many of the pupils were from extremely deprived backgrounds – the care system, refugees, struggling single-parent families – and they frequently identified their Oxbridge offers as a transitional moment not just for them but for their families as well.6 We’re drawn to these stories because they offer both a satisfying moral curve – effort and worth rewarded – and a sense of drama, of rags to riches. But do these stories hold any more meaning for the ordinary British schoolchild than, for example, Cinderella or Dick Whittington? From one perspective, yes: in the last twenty years, there has been some encouraging progress. Between 2002 and 2011, the achievement gaps for the richest and poorest 20 per cent at GCSE level narrowed by 13 per cent (to 18 per cent), with London schools in particular seeing rapid improvement since the 1990s.7 Between 2004 and 2009 the university attainment gap between the most and least deprived also narrowed by 3 per cent (to 37 per cent).8 There are nearly twice as many people aged eighteen to twenty-four in full-time tertiary education as there were when my family arrived in the UK in 1992.9 But these relative improvements throw into relief the huge gulf that continues to exist – and which persists far beyond university admissions. For a start, while stories about education and social mobility often focus on admission to university – and especially to Oxbridge – a more significant factor is the way in which not being educated abruptly curtails any chance of improving your circumstances. According to the OECD, young people in Britain are the ‘most illiterate in the developed world’,10 and the number of children leaving school without basic numeracy and literacy is rising, rather than falling.11 Lacking these basic skills affects your life in almost every way: your employment opportunities, your ability to claim your legal rights or manage your interactions with institutions and government bodies, your mental and physical health, the likelihood of being on benefits or in prison.

we seem unable to really respond to them: something about them prevents us from addressing the astonishing, paralysing unfairness of the society they represent. As Alan Bennett put it: If, unlike the Daily Mail, one believes that the nation is still generous, magnanimous and above all fair it is hard not to think that we all know that to educate not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents is both wrong and a waste. Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been a waste.45

When it came to my turn, I joked that, at the kind of school Nick Clegg had attended, confidence was something that was rammed down your throat in a way that could only be compared to the process of making foie gras. Instilling this confidence can sometimes be cruel, but the quality of the product it produces is worth the wait. But, as we all know, it’s very expensive.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2015 found that people in poverty are less likely to have mixed, diverse social networks, as well as being less likely to have a majority of friends who are in employment.27 And it means geographical isolation too: though we lived in one of the most rich and cultured cities in the world, we never left our immediate neighbourhood. Being poor seeps into everything, and shapes every thought you have: it lowers your horizons, making you unable to see beyond your immediate situation, and the stress it puts you under makes it difficult to plan ahead, think clearly or make the right decisions: one study found that ‘financial stress … had the effect of making [a participant’s] IQ drop by between 13 and 14 per cent. That is the same impact as going without a night’s sleep.’28

why would that change? Contrast this, for example, with the experience of a young, under-privileged, black man. In Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, the journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge explores how the confidence of young black men in ‘the system’ is undermined at every turn: at school by the lowered expectations from their teachers; by the poverty of ambition of the culture that surrounds them; by bad experiences with authority, particularly the police; by the fact that, if they get to university, they’ll have to work harder to get the same grades as their white peers; by the far higher rate of rejections they’ll receive when they send their CVs out; and by the extremely high unemployment rates that affect young black men. As she puts it:

you come from an Indian or a Chinese background, you’re more likely than a disadvantaged white person to end up in an elite occupation, but if you’re Bangladeshi, you’re only half as likely to do so.13 These differences are sometimes attributed to ‘culture’ through a sort of ‘positive racism’ (if such a thing exists), which sees the Chinese and Indians as ‘good immigrants’: striving, hardworking, education-focused, upwardly mobile. But clearly, they are really about class. Chinese and Indian immigrants, like the Nigerian and Ugandan immigrants who arrived in the UK in the 1980s and whose children also perform well at school, were often from the middle classes, while Pakistani and Bengali immigrants often came from the equivalent of the working class.14 It’s ironic that, in the endless circling conversation around ‘diversity’, the fact that the ethnic population of Britain is just that – diverse – is often ignored completely.

Your family’s history is important because when we want to work out who someone is, we often ask where they come from. Rightly or wrongly, we assume that your life story, and the story of your family, tells us something about who you are: it gives you a context. My story tells you (and me) that I come from a line of people who began as nomadic herders living in harsh conditions; who were illiterate or, at best, school dropouts; who had many children, sometimes with different partners; who lived difficult lives consistently disrupted by sudden tragedy and death. My story also tells you that I come from a line of deeply proud and resilient survivors; of quick learners, of people who rarely stay down for long, of ambitious entrepreneurs who seized opportunities when they came along, adapting to circumstances wherever they found themselves; of talented linguists and sharp minds; of travellers, wanderers and explorers, and of people never afraid to leave what was familiar in search of new horizons. A line of people who were always prepared to try their hand at something, no matter how difficult it might first appear. This is my context. And we are right to assume that context is key:

People Like Us (Hashi Mohamed)

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