London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2025

The posh state of Britain

The posh state of Britain

The British caste system: Institutions of government may champion diversity, but they're dominated by the same class.

Who would have guessed that the UK’s famously class-bound civil service is still disproportionately posh?

Because that is what the Social Mobility Commission has revealed this week – that the vast majority of the 450,000-strong bureaucracy serving Her Majesty’s Government are still far closer to Sir Humphrey Appleby than they are to Arthur Seaton. In fact, the class composition of its senior ranks has barely changed since the 1960s.

According to the research, 72 per cent of civil servants come from a ‘privileged background’; a quarter of those holding the 6,000-or-so top jobs were privately educated; ministerial meetings are brimful with Latin jokes and cricket metaphors. Even if someone from a less privileged background does enter the civil service, the report suggests that the in-house culture of Classical jokes and oblique references makes it very difficult for the uninitiated to ‘climb the velvet drainpipe’ – which itself sounds like a public-school initiation ritual.

This really shouldn’t be a surprise. Not just because the civil service has long been a preserve of Britain’s upper middle classes, privately educated or otherwise. But also because Britain’s governing institutions are increasingly dominated once more by the socio-economically advantaged – that is, those from affluent backgrounds, with educations at good schools in the right areas, and degrees obtained from Russell Group universities, followed by an easy-ish ascent up the ‘velvet drainpipe’.

This doesn’t just apply to the civil service. Look, also, at parliament. In 1951, 18 per cent of MPs from the three main parties were former manual workers. By 2015, this had fallen to just three per cent among the four largest parties. This shift in the class composition of parliament is most notable among the misnomer party, Labour. Of its 364 MPs in 1966, 109 were from working-class occupations (mining/manual work). By 2015, just 22 of its 232 MPs were from working-class occupations.

What is perhaps most telling about the increasingly class-bound nature of our governing elite is that this socio-economic monoculture has grown alongside that same elite’s obsession with increasing the ‘diversity’ of its ranks. So it has talked endlessly about enlarging the proportion of women. Of expanding the proportion of people from BAME backgrounds. Of promoting the visibility of the genderfluid. All so as to better represent the diverse nation they serve. And it has done this when it is becoming more, not less, socio-economically homogeneous.

The civil service itself, for example, has made a concerted effort to improve its ethnic diversity, launching numerous inclusion strategies, establishing several internal forae, and so on. And it has worked. As the Institute for Government reports, ‘The representation of BAME staff has improved at each grade since 2010′.

Yet for all our governing institutions’ jargonised chat about representing the UK’s diverse society, they have rarely been less representative of its class composition. They talk of championing diversity, while maintaining a rigid class hierarchy in practice.

This gives the lie to the cult of diversity. Sure, from the legislature to the departments of government down, our ruling institutions look increasingly multiform. But class-wise, they are increasingly uniform. They are dominated by people whose superficial differences only disguise their shared socio-economic experience, their common, largely upper-middle-class background, and their shared worldview. And it tells. Not just in the Latin allusions and sticky-wicketing innuendo, but in their broader political outlook too: their often anti-working-class prejudices, and their own elite self-interests.

We don’t need the Social Mobility Commission to point this out. It was to be read most clearly in the angry incredulity writ large on the collective face of government when people voted for Brexit. And it can be read time and again in that gap between the worldview of our political elites and that of those they at best misunderstand, and at worst denigrate.

No doubt things are shifting in the post-Brexit landscape. But, as the Social Mobility Commission shows us, such change as is necessary won’t come from within our governing institutions. It will have to come, as ever, from without.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
×