James Blunt's letter to Chris Bryant makes him appear a paranoid wazzock
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Version 0 of 1. Over the past couple of years James Blunt has proven himself a master of the Twitter comeback, smacking down random abuse with panache. Clearly the 140-character format brings out the best on him because his open letter to the new shadow culture minister Chris Bryant is a wreck. In it, he eviscerates with considerable energy and venom the suggestion that his Harrow education directly led to his success in music. The only catch is that this is not at all what Bryant claimed. In fact, The MP only mentioned Blunt once, in passing, along with actor Eddie Redmayne, as an example of a celebrity from a privileged upbringing. He said nothing more about Blunt or indeed about the music industry. Guilty of immense narcissism, if nothing else, Blunt has made Bryant’s wide-ranging, systemic argument all about himself. Perhaps that was an honest mistake, and Bryant’s comments simply triggered years of pent-up resentment about being mocked for his poshness, but Blunt’s strawmanning completely obscures the issue. Related: James Blunt attacks ‘classist gimp’ Chris Bryant over diversity comments Of course, Blunt had to struggle to get a thriving career, as every musician must. And perhaps when he was looking for a record deal a decade ago being posh made him an anomaly, although it certainly doesn’t now, when many of Britain’s leading stars, including Mumford & Sons and Florence Welch, hail from the 7% of the population who enjoyed a private education. But Bryant never claimed Blunt was given a career on a plate. In fact, I doubt he gave Blunt’s career path much thought at all. He was addressing the bigger picture. Discussions of social diversity in the arts should never be reduced to individuals. You don’t achieve what Blunt or Redmayne have done without talent, charisma and hard work. Record contracts and movie deals aren’t won on the playing fields of Eton. But when you find a disproportionate number of new stars hail from the same privately educated backgrounds, and fewer than before from socially disadvantaged positions, you don’t have to be a class warrior to wonder why. Related: James Blunt’s letter to Chris Bryant - in full Had Blunt simply focused on his own experience, the letter wouldn’t be so bad but it ends up sounding like Mitt Romney or Ayn Rand with additional comedy swearing. To Blunt, Bryant’s ambition to give create opportunities for a broader swathe of society is “the politics of jealousy”. He thinks that less privileged musicians look at his achievements and cry, “It’s not fair.” He thinks that being “classist” is a serious prejudice even though social mobility in Britain is getting worse all the time and the privately educated wield more power, in more fields of endeavour, than they have in decades. He implies you cannot celebrate success unless you do so unquestioningly. That is what Romney tried to do in the last presidential election after Barack Obama said: “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own … If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” When Obama told businessmen, “You didn’t build that,” he didn’t mean, as Romney claimed he meant, that they hadn’t earned it. He meant that in any society factors other than individual graft and moxie come into play. For musicians with wealth behind them, that could mean access to instruments or a van to travel to gigs, the ability to pursue their dream for longer without pay, and a sense of financial security if that dream fails to materialise. As Bryant told the Guardian: “The truth is that people who subsidise the arts most are artists themselves. That of course makes it much more difficult if you come from a background where you can’t afford to do that.” It can also mean confidence and its evil twin entitlement. Even Blunt acknowledges this when he says that Harrow taught me that “I should aim high.” Is that not at least one advantage? Related: Chris Bryant’s reply to James Blunt – in full Nobody that I’ve come across, certainly not Bryant, wants to remove these advantages from the rich, rather to extend as many as possible to the rest — not to pull the privileged down but to lift others up. Similarly, if you say you’d like to see more black actors on television it doesn’t mean you have a vendetta against white ones. Its alarming that Blunt interprets this ambition as a plan to “hobble that success and ‘level the playing field’” and diagnoses it as “narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-‘G’-from-‘GB’ thinking”. Does he really think that opportunity is a zero-sum game? Does he have so little faith in his talent that he believes that more opportunities for others will threaten his own position? Has he confused equality of opportunity with equality of outcome and convinced himself that those who want to level the playing field dream of the triumph of mediocrity? What I see in Blunt’s letter is simple denial. Only the privileged are in a position to deny, or perhaps not even to realise, that privilege exists. Many people fear that to acknowledge the advantages bestowed on them by race, gender or class detracts from what they do and makes them less special, but that is a fallacy. Accepting how you have benefited from your place in society doesn’t mean you are a less an impressive individual. It just requires realising that somebody with equal talent but less wealth and opportunity might face more obstacles than you — obstacles, dare I say it, more substantial than having a posh accent. Blunt certainly had the right to reply to Bryant. It’s a shame he’s used that right to make himself look like a paranoid wazzock. |