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The privileged few are tightening their

grip on the arts
Politics, journalism, the arts they are all increasingly controlled
by nice people from wealthy backgrounds. And their niceness is
strangling us
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Saturday 13 September 2014 14.13 EDT

'Sleek young beasts' (from left): Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Natalie Dormer in Riot Club. Photograph:
Sportsphoto/Allstar/Blueprint Pictures

Decades back, when the young Judi Dench starred as Juliet, her mother and father
joined the cast. In Act 3 Juliet learns that Romeo has killed her cousin, and cries:
"Where is my father, and my mother?"
"Here we are, darling," shouted her parents from the stalls, "in row H!"
You cannot imagine the parents of today's stars being so gauche. They come from a
world that is closer to David Cameron's Bullingdon Club than Dench's Quaker roots in
Yorkshire. The forthcoming Riot Club which bears the subtitle "Filthy. Rich. Spoilt.
Rotten" is meant to satirise David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson's
days at the Buller. Unintentionally it will also satirise itself. To put it as kindly as I can,

the producers did not have to search far to find actors who could give a convincing
impersonation of inherited privilege. Max Irons son of Jeremy, since you asked
plays one of the sleek young beasts. Freddie Fox, son of Edward, another. The only
difference between them and the current leadership of the Tory party is that they went
into acting rather than politics. If there is a danger of reading too much into their
slipping into their fathers' shoes, there is also a danger of reading too little. The careers
of Edward and James Fox show there have always been upper-class actors, and I would
not have it any other way. It's just that with Damian Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch,
Eddie Redmayne and Dominic West, there are so many of them. In arts that boast that
they "celebrate diversity" everyone looks the same.
Dame Judi tells the Observer today aspiring actors beg her for money to help fund their
training. She worries that acting may become an elite occupation for the children of the
rich, because no one else will be able to meet the costs and take the risks. Ben
Stephenson, the BBC's head of drama, said much the same at the Edinburgh festival but
did not add that television is a racket, too. You cannot get a job in broadcasting unless
you are prepared to work as an intern. In most cases, you cannot work as an intern
unless you have family money to feed and house you.
But then who am I to criticise Stephenson when journalism is as much of a rich kids'
game? Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that journalists used to
come from families 6% better off than average, whereas now they come from homes that
are 42% richer. Indeed, British journalists, the supposed tribunes of the people, now
hail from wealthier backgrounds than, er, bankers, an awkward fact that ought to cause
embarrassment all round. I look at my younger self today and wonder if he could
become a journalist on a serious newspaper. My parents were teachers. They were
comfortably off by the standards of 1980s Manchester, but they could never have
afforded to rent me rooms in London and cover my expenses while I went from
internship to internship. They had to look after my sisters as much as anything else.
The hypocrisies of British culture are enough to drive the sane paranoid, but it is not
quite the class conspiracy it seems. To be sure, it is suffocating, narrow and on the edge
of a descent into a mediocre mush. But not a conspiracy for all that. Working-class
actors or musicians cannot live on the dole now while they struggle to break through.
The sanctions from the jobcentres whip them into line. If you want to know why British
pop has lost its rough energy, you should blame the Department for Work and Pensions,
not a plot by the record label executives. In any case, tens of thousands of young people
want to work in the arts, television, music and journalism. Why shouldn't their potential
employers, often short of money themselves, take advantage of the laws of supply and
demand?
Those who receive public money have no right to do so. Working- and lower-

middle-class citizens should not have to fund through their taxes and the lottery arts
organisations that deny opportunities to their children. One of the most admirable men
I know is Martin Bright, who threw in a career in journalism to found the Creative
Society, which gives working-class teenagers the same opportunities in the arts that
their middle- and upper-class contemporaries receive. Diversity creates uniformity, he
says, because it ignores class. As a result, projects for women or the ethnic minorities
are colonised by the middle class. The only positive discrimination that works is for arts
organisations to go into jobcentres and find talented young people on the dole who
deserve a break, and too few want to try it.
What applies to artists applies to the audience. The National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts has told recipients of public money that they should at least
think of putting Royal Opera House shows, for example, or National Theatre
productions on the web once their runs are over. The overwhelming majority of people
who cannot get to London, and could not afford tickets if they did, would then see the
work their taxes helped pay for. It does no good. The notion that publicly funded art
must be publicly available does not occur to today's generation of cultural bureaucrats.
Expanding the range of British culture is not just an act of social justice, however. When
the arts restrict their gene pool, they restrict their talent pool, too. No Premier League
football club would give contracts only to children with private incomes and expect to
remain in the premier league. The arts, broadcasting, serious journalism and publishing
are coming dangerously close to doing just that, and its class-based culture is becoming
a second-rate culture. British television drama could once boast that it was "the best in
the world". Now the best comes from America and Scandinavia. When Macmillan and
her colleagues at the Institute of Education compared IQs, they found today's younger
cohort of professionals was, on average, slightly dimmer than the previous, poorer
generation.
In writing this piece, I do not mean to disparage the young, privately educated
journalists I see around me, the sprigs of the Fox and Irons families, the commissioning
editors of the BBC and the staff of the National Theatre and Royal Opera House. They
are all nice people. But there's the rub. They are too fucking nice for Britain's good.
Their niceness is a noose that is strangling our ability to talk to ourselves and to the
world.
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