The City still runs on nepotism

When Liz Truss says she wants to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, she thinks she is making a moral argument. The rich deserve to keep their money because they are the best and brightest among us. They have succeeded on their own merit and not because of their class, sex or ethnicity.

This, she believes, is a Thatcherite view of society. But the crisis that her government has imposed on Britain is as much due to her misreading of modern history as of her economic illiteracy. Her support for the City rests on a misunderstanding of how Thatcherism transformed the top of British society, as a new and devastating study shows.

‘Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work’ by Louise Ashley leads a herd of sacred cows to the slaughter. The standard story of the last half-century says that the UK used to be run by upper-class amateurs, tied together by family, school and university connections.