up and away

Vanity Fair has a profile of David Cameron. But never mind that: I’m going to indulge in that traditional British cliché of calling Americans out on getting us slightly wrong over here in Absurdistan:

They are all members of a secret society, a Lord of the Flies rich-boy club known for spectacular drunkenness and casual destructiveness, the Bullingdon Club, posed in tailcoats, all with arrogant and dripping-with-scorn expressions, looking ever so much as upper-class young men might have looked, in the description of Frank Luntz, the American pollster who was at Oxford at the time, “on the eve of the Battle of Britain.”

The pre-war relationship between class and air-mindedness is indeed fascinating. Patrick Bishop goes into considerable detail in this in his books about fighter and bomber command. Broadly speaking, the pilots and flying crew in both came from the people Orwell once described as knowing nothing of the contents of the bible but exactly how magnetos worked. But within that, there were distinct differences. Fighter pilots were consciously drawn from the established middle classes: the selection criteria included ability to play the piano, which was believed to provide the kind of light but firm touch necessary to control skittish monoplanes. Bombers were crewed from lower down the class hierarchy. Fighter pilots might have been cynical about their media status as knights of the air but still took it as their due. Bomber crews cheerfully accepted that they were airborne truck drivers. Why not? A fair few of their fathers had been actual truck drivers. In both cases, it was a step up. Air-mindedness as a whole was a feature of upward mobility: per ardua ad astra in its literal sense, and the RAF was by some way the most meritocratic of the armed services.

Anyway, Cameron and Co don’t look like they’re about to take to the air in that Bullingdon shot: they look like they’re going to slip into some undemanding staff job. Those boys have the proverbial red tabs on their underwear. This, perhaps, is part of their problem.

 Michael Wolff goes on to define what he believes Cameron’s appeal is:

Indeed, the British electorate seems to teeter now between a logical suspicion of the true nature of the man and a desire to be generous and accepting, to want what he seems to be proposing, which is this adaptable, fix-it-if-it’s-broken, don’t-fix-if-it-isn’t—or if it is broken, like the N.H.S., don’t open a can of worms, which will make it worse—approach, led by an intelligent-seeming and pleasant fellow. Somebody you can depend upon to hold it all together. Who would not vote for that?

Umm...what? Still, no complaints here. We can’t figure it out either. A vacuum has been filled by a slightly thicker vacuum.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

"Broadly speaking, the pilots and flying crew in both came from the people Orwell once described as knowing nothing of the contents of the bible but exactly how magnetos worked."

Sounds about right. Grandpa was an engineering apprentice and one of the first class of such to be sent to Cranwell and made into officers (and pilots). Sort of an experiment. Frank Whittle was in the same group. Mid 1920s ish.

"and the RAF was by some way the most meritocratic of the armed services. "

Again, sounds about right. When Pa joined the Navy after WWII it was still assumed that a Naval Officer would have a private income. Something the RAF had definitely not assumed a generation before.

[Chris Williams]

Only a very small proportion of the engineering apprentices made it to Cranwell, though. The big difference here is between services tooling up for a big war (that's the RAF between 1935 and 1945, the Army between 1937 and c.1960 and the RN between c.1938 and c.1945), and those who feel themselves to be in a peacetime steady state. Best intro to this, and indeed to a lot of other things, is John James _The Paladins_.

[Jakob]

I see that Chris beat me to _The Paladins_. According to James, the fighter boys of 1940 were overwhelmingly public rather than grammar school; even engineering apprentices were generally middle-class, as you had to be able to pay the fees. Where this put them on Orwell's Bible/Magneto continuum I'm note sure.

The bomber crews were less socially exclusive mainly because the bomber offensive was a form of mass technical warfare, so they had to be drawn from the grammar schools.

[ajay]

Sorry, jamie, you should have known you'd got something wrong when Worstall turned up in your comments section agreeing with you...

[Paul Sagar]

Great post.

That's all I have to add.

[Alex]

Also, the NHS is broken how? It's not the UK that spends dramatically more than the G8 average on healthcare and gets far worse outcomes while still having a sizable population with no medical care whatsoever, now, is it?

This is what Jerome "like Dsquared...but French" Guillet calls a Europe Is Doomed! Alert.