Polly Toynbee, often described as the ‘darling of the left,’ despite her less than easy relationship with the British Labour party, appeared at the Off The Shelf literary festival to promote her most recent publication, An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. Much like her previous Orwell-esque reportages, her latest book deals with the greatest of British riddles: class. However, unlike her previous enquiries, this book takes the form of a memoir, and is a study of class, one which Toynbee argued would be little understood by sociologists, being from the perspective of the privileged.
Toynbee used the hour or so allotted to recount her eccentric and extraordinary life, beginning with tales about her torrid time as a Bristol boarder, and her father, described by Toynbee as ‘a writer, a critic, a rebel, a drunk and a communist.’ She suggested she first countenanced class aged seven when subjected to the harangues of a working-class woman whose daughter happened to be taking her turn to tow Toynbee in the carriage they had crafted as part of mindless childsplay. That childsplay could communicate such condescension did not, retrospectively, shock Toynbee. Such an insight was key to elucidating her view of class as a whole.
Toynbee argued that class in Britain has always been complicated by its finer ‘gradations’ – things unconsidered by, and uninteresting to, sociologists. Whether one says ‘loo’ or ‘lavatory’ tells us almost as much about someone’s background as their postcode does, and in this sense, class, no matter our monetary or marital status, never leaves us. Thus, even after many working-class children have moved onto Cambridge they are, in Toynbee’s eyes, reminded that they cannot buy the ‘supreme self-confidence’ that the upper classes of our country possess in abundance. Hence, they remain reluctant to enter the upper echelons of professions which they feel ‘locked out’ of. In this sense ‘social mobility’ only serves the meritocratic subterfuge that still exists in Britain. Only once Britain discovers that the ‘meritocracy’ is a deception will it be able to address its class problem, one that has antagonised the nation since antiquity.
Some of this analysis seemed semi-socialist, yet Toynbee insisted she remained a ‘social-democrat’ (her several gushes over Starmer and his shadow cabinet solidified such a statement). She sees a next Labour government’s mission being the reinstitution of the Sure Start child support programme, and the cementation of its legacy, so that it cannot be stripped back within years of their inevitable exit from office. Following on from this, she claimed responsibility for the phrase ‘the class ceiling,’ and was glad to see its ‘shattering’ as being at the centre of many conference speeches given by the Labour Party the week prior. All this made one wonder whether Toynbee’s influence over the party is at its apogee, and thus question if she cares that she’s no longer an A-List columnist, something evidenced by the fact that there were many empty seats at the Octagon.
Rating: ★★★★☆
An Uneasy Inheritance was published in June 2023. Other Off the Shelf Festival events can be found here.