In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

"So what if we went to Oxford, or if our parents were solicitors?", the line of defence went. "Our hearts are in the right place. We fight for the many, not the few."
Ten years on, seeing where PMC domination of the left has taken the movement, we can revisit those criticisms and see the importance of the original pushback.
What a PMC parental background and a prep-school and Oxbridge education tend to provide their beneficiaries with is a high degree of entitlement, verbal polish and presentation, and an often unshakeable personal confidence.
Combined with the utopian and improvement- and uplift-focused aspects of left thought, this prior socialisation tends to produce a highly authoritarian form of left-managerialism, one in which the PMC left appoint themselves both moral spokespeople and moral technicians.
It's not so much that these left representatives are "out of touch with the working class" (though they certainly are), it's that they are "in touch" with others of their class, producing an intense degree of PMC class solidarity within the erstwhile left.
Ideas spread easily from Stanford and Harvard to Oxford, Cambridge and Copenhagen because members of the international PMC are primed to pick them up and assimilate them, regardless of nationality. https://t.co/iTJapCPTAZ
Graduates of the same universities, in managerial positions in the educational and GLAM sectors, assume the same ideological positions and impose uniform blanket policies as though all acting in unison.
PMC socialisation in elite schools and universities expresses itself in other ways as well. Social media mobbing and ostracism among the LARPing left reflect the networking and social skills learned in elite school and university common rooms.
The aim of the PMC left isn't the creation of a broad and successful political movement. Instead, it is to imbue the PMC with a new sense of moral authority (and moral mission) and to create career opportunities for highly educated moral technicians in institutions.

More from Education

Our preprint on the impact of reopening schools on reproduction number in England is now available online: https://t.co/CpfUGzAJ2S. With @Jarvis_Stats @amyg225 @kerrylmwong @KevinvZandvoort @sbfnk + John Edmunds. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED. 1/


We used contact survey data collected by CoMix (
https://t.co/ezbCIOgRa1) to quantify differences in contact patterns during November (Schools open) and January (Schools closed) 'Lockdown periods'. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 2/

We combined this analysis with estimates of susceptibility and infectiousness of children relative to adults from literature. We also inferred relative susceptibility by fitting R estimates from CoMix to EpiForecasts estimates(https://t.co/6lUM2wK0bn). NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 3/


We estimated that reopening all schools would increase R by between 20% to 90% whereas reopening primary or secondary schools alone would increase R by 10% to 40%, depending on the infectiousness/susceptibility profile we used. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 4/


Assuming a current R of 0.8 (in line with Govt. estimates: https://t.co/ZZhCe79zC4). Reopening all schools would increase R to between 1.0 and 1.5 and reopening either primary or secondary schools would increase R to between 0.9 and 1.2. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 5/

You May Also Like