Lectures from Owen Jones and the far left on social mobility? Stroll on!

Owen Jones has a point and it is not often it is possible to say that. The Guardian columnist and new puritan Corbynite campaigner is rarely anything other than completely wrong. But on social mobility in the media – the latest row in which he is embroiled – he has touched on something important. Sadly, as is the way, he over does it and makes a total twit of himself in the process.

The Guardian columnist is sometimes compared (by me, anyway) to the Squealer character in Orwell’s Animal Farm, because of the way in which he dextrously explains the latest thinking of the regime, and the true direction of the revolution, even if it is 180 degrees different from the thinking the day before. Jones is the modern day Squealer, handing down rulings – in the form of tweets – clarifying what Corbynites should be thinking.

Jones must do this to work his way back into good odour with the Corbynite leadership, which, it is said, hates him because he betrayed Corbyn (said he was crap and couldn’t win). OJ then had to hastily get back on board at the election last year. Awkward.

Owen’s latest ruling is about journalists, a bold move for someone who makes a very good living working with British journalists, relying on them not to screw up his copy or even, one day, when the carnival leaves town and Momentum lies in the dustbin of history, fire him.

Today Jones tweeted:

“The main thing I’ve learned from working in the British media is that much of it is a cult. Afflicted by a suffocating groupthink, intolerant of critics, hounds internal dissenters, full of people who made it because of connections and/or personal background rather than merit.”

The notion of being lectured about social mobility by Owen Jones, a man of the Corbynite far left who writes for the Guardian, is hilarious. The Guardian has always employed a lot of people who went to smart schools. It still does so. But it is not nearly as elitist as the Corbynite inner circle.

Which school did Seumas Milne, former comment editor of the Guardian, defender of Stalin, and director of communications for the saintly bearded Jeremy, go to? Winchester, where he was a Mao supporter.

James Schneider, co-founder of Momentum and key figure in the revolution to ruin the Labour party? The Dragon School followed by Winchester.

Even more amusingly, the appalling Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War movement who only left the Communist Party of Britain in 2016, is now a consultant to Corbyn. Murray – or Andrew Drummond-Murray to give him his real name – was educated at a Benedictine independent boarding school.

Ironically, Murray is where all this meets – Fleet Street, privilege, connections and pampered Marxist maniacs. Murray left school with few qualifications and became a messenger on a magazine and then a copy boy on the International Herald Tribune. After a spell on the Morning Star he worked for the Soviet news agency. Really.

Perhaps, next, Owen Jones will write an attack on the Marxist elitists and public school boys that dominate the Corbyn leadership. Or perhaps not.

Which reminds me. Recently, Jones was attacking my former boss Andrew Neil, demanding the removal from the BBC of one of its leading journalists. Andrew Neil is a neat contrast with Andrew Murray. Neil was a grammar school boy with no establishment media connections, who became editor of The Sunday Times aged 33. The newspaper world I joined was socially mobile and full of bright people.

There is something else curious about the Jones ruling on modern journalism, however. He says that the “main thing” he has “learned from working in the British media is that much of it is a cult.”

The main thing? That is the main thing he has learned? That suggests a very narrow experience of journalism, going not far beyond the bit in which he pops into the Guardian to pontificate once in a while. In light of his latest tweets about hacks, he should probably give the Guardian office and journalists in general a miss for a while, after today.

His perspective does seem to be very limited, which makes me wonder about much else that he writes. In dismissing the media, he seems to take no account of the reporters battling away to reveal stories about the powerful, the subs doing what they can with finite resources, the snappers and foreign correspondents risking life and limb, the many admin staff and people on the commercial side selling like mad and improvising ways to keep quality media alive so that Jones might preen about and get paid for it.

Jones went on to quote a Sutton Trust report which shows the extent to which those educated at top schools dominate in the media.

This infuriated a lot of journalists, especially those of us from a comprehensive school background. The survey cited is old, and many senior journalists in fields such as news, politics and business hardly had a silver spoon experience on the way in. A lot fought their way up through local papers until they hit Fleet Street or Grub Street. It is a strange business journalism in Britain – not a profession, always a trade – and usually those who break into it have got in by sheer persistence, working silly hours. Nonetheless, it can be exciting. Personally, I never wanted to do anything else.

As I said, though, at the heart of the juvenile Jones rant is a fair point. The media is once again too narrow in its recruitment. A lot of media companies know this, but more can be done to address it.

Of course, the shift back in favour of those educated privately is partly a result of the carnage wrought on the education system by the left from the 1960s onwards. Often it was public school boys who were the worst, smashing up the routes out for bright poor kids in pursuit of an egalitarian ideal while they opened another bottle of claret for Roy Jenkins.

The effect in finance, academia, science, law, and media, has been a reversal in social mobility.

Still, it is a complex subject, but the idea that journalism is “full” of people who made it because of personal background and not merit suggests Jones doesn’t know many journalists or know much about the economics of media. It is an industry that has been hit by an internet hurricane, which has smashed up newsrooms and destroyed many local and regional papers which used to offer a training.

An added complication today is that some youngsters who could earn much more joining one of the big professions would rather be journalists. Isn’t that terrific? Yes. The world has more than enough City and Wall Street graduate trainees. If a new generation want to be journalists instead, then our democracy will be healthier and the free press stands a chance of surviving and prospering.

Why does that matter? Like the legal system, a free press is not just another business. Journalism is fundamental to a healthy democracy and a free society. It is the wiring.