Once you see it, you see it everywhere. In the BBC, in academia, in the arts and the civil service, in the minds of middle-class parents and on the opposition benches. It’s nebulous, shifting and insidious. For some years, this government has been at war with an invisible enemy, responsible for almost everything that is wrong with this country. Snobbery.
Take snobbery about vocational courses, a particularly stubborn political opponent. Education secretaries have been fighting it for decades. “I’m determined to tackle the minority of schools that perpetuate an outdated snobbery towards apprenticeships,” said Nicky Morgan in 2016. Her successor Damian Hinds was equally determined to thwart “opinion formers” who felt “vocational courses are for other people’s children”. Gavin Williamson, for his part, battled an “inbuilt snobbishness” from families who think their children should go to university as a “rite of passage”. And so on.
