The poshness test lasts a lifetime – to believe otherwise is fantasy

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/15/poshness-test-recruitment-elitism

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Related: 'Poshness tests' block working-class applicants at top companies

I am just nipping into Greggs with a can of Special Brew in my hand because I really need to find a loo. This is what I would be doing if I conformed to my class according to a silly poshness test score that showed I am as common as muck. My imaginary scuzziness is hardly an earth-shattering revelation, nor is the news that a “class ceiling” operates to lock most people (who go to normal schools) out of the elite jobs in financial services and the law. Jobs and traineeships are given to those exhibiting “polish”, confidence and who have travelled widely: this is, on the whole, the privately educated.

Now that it seems that class has become a murky principle around which to organise politically – currently dealt with by denial or the dead-eyed mantra of “aspiration” – it somehow still creeps back into the debate via this discussion of “poshness”. This all becomes a silly way to talk about bizarre codes of etiquette involving cummerbunds, sherry and the correct way to say “toilet”.

The reality, of course, is that one is inducted into these codes economically. If your education is paid for it is important to think it is the best and that all this codified and learnt behaviour is somehow a measure of character and talent. It is equally important for the system to reproduce itself by keeping some of these codes slightly vague. So no matter how hard you try, you will fail as an impostor, somehow betraying your “otherness” – that otherness being one of the 93% who are not privately educated.

This clone recruitment… works against women, ethnic minorities and working-class people

All of this reveals an inherent laziness at the top. This clone recruitment, giving jobs to those exactly like yourself, those who remind you of yourself at a younger age, works against women, ethnic minorities and working-class people. Thus a huge pool of talent and potential innovation is lost.

The middle-class mania for extra-curricular activities for kids, from cello to Mandarin, is an attempt to bump their children up by producing this unspoken “well-roundedness” that the elite requires. A few frauds may get through but the thing is there is never just one poshness test . It goes on for ever.

In my job it certainly operates like this. I realised early on that I could learn how to pronounce the name of certain Oxford colleges, but it wouldn’t really matter as I had what a Radio 4 producer told me was “a polytechnic accent”. Nonetheless I found myself in an environment in which everyone somehow knew each other, thought history was reducible to a series of memorised dates and could bore on without a single original thought in their heads.

The whole scam of poshness is exactly the “If you can’t beat them, join them” fantasy played out. You can’t. They recognise and reward their own.

All evidence shows that we do not live in a meritocracy. The posh like to pretend we do. Why the rest of us have to go along with it is beyond the likes of me.