That Britain’s cultural class war is complicated is perhaps most apparent in the fact that Labour’s new culture spokesman, Chris Bryant, was educated at private Cheltenham College while the Conservative Culture Secretary Sajid Javid is a bus driver’s son from a comprehensive school.
When Mr Bryant said: “We can’t just have a culture dominated by [Eton-educated] Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk,” he uncorked a fizzing bottle of sensitivity and resentment and not just about acting.
Mr Bryant’s comments have opened up the debate about worsening social mobility and the growing power and dominance of an affluent London-based elite, benefitting from private school and Oxbridge connections and the exclusive, because of benefit cuts, ability to ride out the years of training thanks to the bank of Mum and Dad.
Mr Bryant emphasised that his concern was not directed against any individual but against the inequality of opportunity.
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Private schools now seem to offer many of the artistic ‘extras’ that have started to disappear in the face of a more ‘vocational’ push in the state-school sector”
But James Blunt, educated like actor Benedict Cumberbatch at Harrow School, responded with fury, calling Bryant “a prejudiced wazzock” teaching “the politics of jealousy” instead of aspiration, and claimed he, Blunt, was himself the victim of anti-upper class discrimination.
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But James Blunt, educated like actor Benedict Cumberbatch at Harrow School, responded with fury, calling Bryant “a prejudiced wazzock” teaching “the politics of jealousy” instead of aspiration, and claimed he, Blunt, was himself the victim of anti-upper class discrimination.