by Atul Hatwal
Rule 11 – What gets measured gets managed
Labour’s favourite pearly peer, Maurice Glasman, popped up last week with his latest sage intervention. This time he was attacking the monopoly of Oxbridge graduates at the top of British politics.
Ignoring, for a moment, the alma mater of Ed Miliband, the man who saw fit to enoble Lord Glasman, and the piquancy of a peer of the realm railing against elitism, he nearly had a point.
Glasman was right to identify an issue with the background of the current crop of political leaders, but an Oxbridge education is not it.
My Uncut colleague Rob Marchant put his finger on it when he tweeted that the real problem was that so many them had never had a proper job.
There’s nothing wrong with having only worked in the Westminster village per se. Many politicos work extremely hard and achieve great things.
Few can doubt Ed Balls’ pivotal role in ensuring that Labour did not enter the euro, which, in hindsight was one of the party’s most valuable legacies from government.
But life as a journalist or political adviser has its limits if the ultimate destination is Parliament.
This new caste of politicians has become increasingly proficient in the Westminster game of snakes and ladders, at the cost of broader experience. The specialised gene pool from which they are drawn has led to professional inbreeding.
