This article by Danny Dorling hits the nail on the head:
The establishment usually does not question what they see as their inherent superiority. If they do they are said to be having a dog-day, to be out of sorts. When they are functioning normally they do not worry about what Boris called ‘shaking the cornflake packet’. Trying to get the few children they assume might be very able, but are stuck at the bottom of the box, up to join their little club at the top. Boris’s mistake was a failure to be careful over how he described this.
If the debate between Nick and Boris does turn into a ‘do we tell the kids Santa doesn’t exist and most of them are going to be losers’ argument, it could get more interesting. In a way Boris is right – if we don’t temper/change/terminate capitalism then only the two per cent will be OK, and half of them will feel poor, while the bottom 16 per cent really will suffer badly and not much can be done for them. What Boris sees as the future is the future if his beliefs prevail.
In some ways the future that Boris wishes for is largely already here. As David Graeber puts it:
‘What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if one per cent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)’
This debate has very little to do with IQ, which is a hang-up from the 11 plus, eugenics and the Nazis. It is about the right-wing seeing no alternative to the status quo. Some on the right can now again see an end of history. They think that the future is so set in stone that it is safe to say so. The élite think that the worst that can happen if they tell the electorate that their leaders think they are stupid is increasing abstentions, which only reinforces their position.
It might be that neither Boris nor Nick are smart enough to imagine all that really is possible and all that might soon occur – because none of us are that smart. Contrast what Boris writes, and how Nick chides him, with what Neal Lawson had to say in the same week about those at the top and those at the bottom
Mark Carrigan 