George Walden doesn't mince his words, but he does relish his phrase-making: "when you are a step behind Dan Quayle, it is time to worry"; "if something looks like a bull, walks like a bull and bellows like a bull, it is very likely a frog"; "a nation genuinely at ease with itself would not need to bolster its self-image by boasting of its penchant for self-deprecation". In The New Elites, a sustained attack on the mediocrity of contemporary British culture, Walden posits the existence of a new "elite of anti-elitists"; an oxymoron which uses the word elite to mean "powerful caste" on the one hand and "repositories of excellence" on the other. The new elite are, in Walden's terms, professionals in the media and the arts who, complicitous with commerce, government and educationalists alike, are both patronizing and enslaved, condescending and cowardly. He does not like it. It is bracingly entertaining, laughingly slaying sacred cows and dodging the secret police of the popular elites. But it is also meant very seriously, and, even when its arguments invite equally serious dissent, it is not merely striking stances.
"Inverted elites in the media come in two varieties: those who pander to popular taste and those who preen themselves on their dissent. The former seek to flatter the masses, the latter to awe them with a false display of heterodox thinking. Either way, the ultimate purpose is to set themselves above them." Walden is defiantly "heterodox" in this book, but would differentiate himself from the inverted elites he refers to here. The difference, as far as one can make out, is that Walden's views are genuinely held and rationally argued, which is fair enough; the only problem is the difficulty in attributing motives to either the panderers or dissenters.
Walden does not dismiss all popular tastes as populist; he exempts, for example, The Simpsons, and argues his case persuasively. While there are definitely many mediocrities in the media who seem swayed more by fads and fashions than genuine taste and discrimination, it is hard, when so many things (as Walden admits) come down to diverse opinion, to distinguish populist taste from popular taste, dissent from false display. Certainly Walden never becomes completely reliant on how one is to sort the sheep from the goats.
Part of his thesis is that the arts in Britain are indiscriminately praised and overpuffed; he is especially good on the hype surrounding the BritArt crew, whose success testifies to cultural amnesia on the part of both artist and audience; their work is utterly derivative and, for all its attempt at scandal and sensation, so comfortably entangled with its commercial concerns that any danger it seems to possess is ersatz. And he is quite right that the culture of hyperbole – for instance suggestions that we are in an age of unparalleled creativity and talent – is a by-product of both commercialism (the triumph of marketing clichés) and political opportunism; in an acid tour of British leaders from Macmillan to Blair, he concludes that "the work of our Prime Ministers in confirming us in our self-satisfaction is never done". Furthermore, the flipside to this, the national culture of self-loathing – our anguish at sporting defeats, or the belief that the English novel is now "dead" – is also hyperbolic: Walden argues, intelligently, that we should be able to accept that sometimes things are neither good nor bad, but middling. Then, perhaps, we could go in search of some genuine excellence.
If Walden is vague when it comes to what excellence might be – The Simpsons or the American sitcom, for blending intellectual jokes with slapstick and "low sassiness", the American novel for a realism rather than overt moralizing, and Proust, for reasons not given – this may be because he is aware that all he would be offering is an account of his own, no doubt excellent, taste. What he is definitely fighting for is more variety, and more discrimination in taste; the enemy is a homogenized mediocrity acceptable to, and overpraised by, everyone.
Whether dissenting voices are as resolutely sidelined as he seems to think (he makes occasional allusions to Stalinism and fascism that, mercifully, confess their own hyperbole), or else are merely the poses of professional controversialists, is less certain.
His explanation for the corrupting homogenization of crassly populist taste varies: the invisible elites, the careerist populists, are blamed for cynically foisting their undemanding version of culture on unsuspecting and less educated masses; the consumer society is blamed for cynically marketing rubbish and then making us believe that we are getting what we want; the schools are blamed for not challenging children, but serving them up to the adult world as consumers; the government is blamed for smilingly collaborating with what they believe is the popular taste, thereby helping to create it. This is where Walden is most confusing; he blames and absolves alternately. Philistine businesses fund the arts, advertise so that TV programmes can get made, run publishing houses and newspapers; and they want profit, not quality. But it isn't business's fault that they produce mass goods for a mass society; it's how they survive and thrive. Nor is it our fault for buying the debased cultural products that attract funding; we have been "conditioned" (through advertising, product placement and so on), we haven't been educated to expect better. It isn't the programme makers' and artists' faults either; their jobs now depend on financial success, and they therefore need predominantly safe options. Politicians are partly to blame, we gather; yet it is also argued that their influence is waning, as electoral turn-out plummets and apathy increases.
The overall argument suggests a series of interlocking complicities, in which the public is the loser, and yet is contributing to that situation. Meanwhile, culture is bland and mediocre, politics is shallow and crass, talent is going elsewhere (where?), and Walden rolls his eyes in dismay. The logical extension of some of his views would be for higher spending on the arts, but less control over the results; a more diverse media, less dependent on easy sales; a strengthening of public-service broadcasting; a better-educated population; a decline in consumerism and marketing; and a government less beholden to public opinion. Some of these views are revolutionary, and none is spelt out.
One subtext of the argument is that "high culture" is difficult and demanding, or is seen to be; and that the majority of the public are seen, rightly or wrongly, as not being able to handle it. So they are provided with something less demanding, and told that it is in fact as good as "high culture"; and that, in every sense, buy it. Walden's argument is, in essence, that the education system is sending out dumb, undemanding consumers, in the dual interests of anti-elitists, who do not want schoolchildren to feel that they are excluded, and business, which wants customers for its products. There is surely a great deal of truth in this. What one might do about it is a larger and more complex question. Some of Walden's arguments and examples suggest that he thinks the proper teaching of the classics is required, and one agrees; but he is perhaps wrong to criticize the teaching of more contemporary subjects alongside the canon. One reason children are taught about the media and its products these days is in order that they may equip themselves better for adult life. In a world dominated by new media and ever-escalating quantities of images and entertainments, the media literacy of the young is not merely desirable but essential.
The New Elites is, beneath its entertaining disdain, a passionate book about education. In one of his last speeches as an MP, Walden argued against the possibility that the State could not indefinitely fund the tuition fees of every university student. His argument was that many of the taxpayers who would be paying to do so would be preserving the advantages of other people's children, particularly those of the privileged middle class. In that speech, he rightly pointed out that neither of the main parties was willing to face the question of higher education head on; and indeed, the Laura Spence affair, to which he refers in The New Elites, showed that Labour were prepared to score populist points while ignoring the possibility that the problem lay not with Oxford or the "elite universities" but with the existence of private schools. In his loathing for consumerism and middle-class privilege, and his desire for universal access to high-quality education, Walden speaks for a politics that no longer has a natural home and for which the prospects are as bleak as ever. But, not for the first time, one wonders what he was doing in the Conservative Party in the first place.