Peter Mandelson, 70, is reportedly distancing himself from speculation that he might be the next UK Ambassador in Washington. Instead, according to the Times (31st August) he pitching into the contest to be the next Vice Chancellor of Oxford University when the current incumbent Lord Patten retires.
In doing so, consciously or not, he seems to have revisited one of the better known post-1945 debates in British history. In the mid-1960s the New Left Review ran a series of pieces by the late Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson that argued that Britain had had an incomplete bourgeois revolution. Hence the House of Lords, the aristocracy and landed wealth still counted for as much as an industrial ruling class. It followed that a working class in his context was not fully formed. E P Thompson in his essay Peculiarities of the English disagreed and pointed, for example, to the formation of the TUC, the Co-Operatives and later the Labour Party as a indicator that a Labourism came into existence after 1850 precisely to grapple not with the Lords but with the factory owners.
Mandelson clearly views Oxford University through the perspective of Nairn/Anderson. He notes that in the last century there have been nine Vice Chancellors only two of which have not been Tories. He argues there should be more political diversity. He argues that he has a global network and understanding of Government that can get things done at the University. He focuses on the need to raise funds from US philanthropists. The point being that while the Tory Chancellors have been stuck in a parochial past Mandelson can situate Oxford University in the context of a global capitalism
Leave a Reply