My father would have some hard words for ex-Professor Jason Arday, the serial fantasist poster cry-bully of our times, and his self-righteous claque of academic supporters. The old man’s qualifications as an Arday denier would be twofold. One, he spent his academic career studying class and society in the USSR (Privilege in the Soviet Union was the title of his most successful book). Second, as a man who made his own meteoric way from a hovel in South Wales to Oxford and then the Foreign Office, and as a member of an ethnic minority to boot, my father would have a few things to say to Arday about the realities of British social mobility and the mechanisms of oppression.
If my father, in 1930s Swansea, was in possession of White Privilege, he did not know it
Start with the verbal jungles of intersectional gobbledegook in which Arday made his career. Communists and Critical Race Theorists alike make their homes in proximate thickets of newspeak. My father spent decades wrestling with Marxist writers who spoke of ‘structural overdetermination”, ‘constitutive disavowal of aporetic structures’ and ‘historiographic metalepsis’ (Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, if anyone’s interested).
Arday’s twaddle, for instance, on ‘dyslexic memory, ChatGPT, and the epistemic disobedience of generative AI’, the for-real title of one of his papers, is very much in the same line of country. Both tribes use jargon as camouflage to disguise underlying vacuousness, but also as a marker to signify their officer-level membership of a cult. The Jesuits had Latin, Brahmins have Sanskrit. Adepts of CRT have their epistemicidal positionality, cisheteropatriarchy, carceral logics and necropolitics. Be still, confused spellchecker, and read your Achille Mbembe.
Marxism and CRT are obviously linked by an ideological umbilical cord. Dialectical materialism holds that class war is the engine of history and the gravitational force that has and always will organise human affairs. Arday’s worldview is powered by precisely the same concept, but with an engine change. Hit ‘Find and Replace All’, substituting ‘race’ for ‘class’, and you could effortlessly translate the entire corpus of Marxist sociology into Arday-ese. Both represent grand theories of everything, universal principles in search of evidence. But that is the definition of religion, not science.
My father spent the early part of his career in Moscow and later, after he was kicked out as a persona non grata, spent decades studying the Soviet world. He was not impressed by what he saw. He always maintained that equality of outcome could only be achieved by making everyone equally poor and miserable.
My father found that Communists preached equality but in practice hoarded privilege, blinded to their own hypocrisy by the conviction that they were entitled to advantage by virtue of their self-evident righteousness. The preening self-regard of today’s equivalent of the proletarian vanguard who now run Cambridge University fits this pattern perfectly. Equally Soviet is their slavish and performative collective loyalty to a set of ideological beliefs that every rank-and-file citizen secretly knows to be nonsense.
The fundamental premise of identitarian politics is that people’s lives, views and positions in society are determined by the social and racial group into which they were born. By this logic, my father, born in 1932 in a modest two-up, two-down terrace house on Aberdiberthi Street in the Haford, Swansea, should have been a committed socialist. The Great Depression, which hit South Wales hard, overshadowed his childhood. There were soup kitchens and working-class radicals, indeed, in 1935, Communist Party of Great Britain leader Harry Pollitt was elected MP for Rhondda East.
The welfare state did not exist in a form anywhere close to what we know today. My grandfather (wounded five times in the Great War) was active in the Comrades’ Sick Club, a kind of co-operative health-insurance society, from which in 1932 he received a cheap mantel clock in recognition of his services as Secretary. (Cheap but built to last; it still ticks in my study.) Food was cooked, and washing water boiled, on a coal-fired range which my father lit every morning. The bath was a tin tub; the privy was in the yard. If my father and his peers were in possession of White Privilege, they did not know it.
Instead of making a career out of railing against oppression, however, my father went to Dynevor Grammar School and there received an education that was to propel him into the heart of the British establishment. That was back in the days when the stuffy old Establishment, as mocked by Peter Cook from the Beyond the Fringe stage in 1960, still actually existed. Grammar schools proved to be the greatest engine of social mobility this country has ever known, as proved by the careers of Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, John Major, Neil Kinnock, Norman Tebbit, David and Richard Attenborough, Andrew Neil and Archbishop Rowan Williams (also a Dynevor boy). But it was largely dismantled, for vindictive class-war reasons, by Labour in the 1960s and 1970s, even if it was Thatcher who, as Education Secretary, closed the most.
Then there is the matter of race, the frisky little pony (as the Russians say) which Jason Arday rode all the way to the heights of academic celebrity. CRT comrades would claim that skin colour is the only determinant of racial difference, as well as an automatic passport to victim status. However, my father, though he never lost, nor tried to lose, his strong Welsh accent, was always self-conscious about his non-English, outsider status.
By his account, being conspicuously Welsh, or for that matter Irish, Scots or Northern, was a serious social handicap back in the 1950s. Indeed, he applied to the then-newly-founded St Catherine’s College, Oxford, because he was sure that the grander colleges would never take on a young man from the Valleys. At his interview, Allan Bullock, the historian, asked if English was his first language. Would my father have had an even steeper climb if he had been from Trinidad, rather than the Haford? Quite possibly. We’d have to ask his contemporary, ITN’s Sir Trevor McDonald.
And yet the evidence shows that Oxford was far less racist, even in the 1950s, than my father may have imagined. A 1957 photograph of the fellows and students of St Antony’s College shows several Indian faces and two African (one of whom was unfortunately hanged as a subversive soon after his return home). In a Britain that was at that time almost exclusively white, persons of colour were over-represented, not under-represented, in the St Antony’s student body.
My father’s life and career became living proof that anyone with sufficient wit and determination could scale the heights of British academia and the civil service, systemic racism and snobbery be damned. Like Norman Tebbit, he was all for people getting off their backsides and onto their bikes in search of self-improvement. State support, which he had studied closely in its Soviet form, was a recipe for slavery and corrosive, cynical idleness. The only ‘Fascists’ in his world were not people who refused to believe that men can be women but rather a crew of young Germans who got in a bomber in 1942, flew over his grandmother’s house in Lamb Street and dropped a large bomb on it.
A world where so-called ‘protected characteristics’ of race, gender or sexual orientation would become the golden tickets to institutional success in academia would have seemed, as one hopes it still does to the vast majority of normal people, bizarre, unfair and profoundly un-British.
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