He shaped our world, and he's not finished yet
He has influenced your life more than anybody bar your parents; yet his name might be less familiar to you than the latest nobody to star in some TV nerdathon.
More than most, he is the architect of the modern state; yet like Einstein after showing us the way to the bomb, he wonders whether he should have stayed at home in his slippers.
To name but a few of Michael Young's achievements or crimes (that depends on which way you swing), he transformed education (by undermining selection and founding the Open University), gave power to customers and ushered in the consumer society (founding the Consumers' Association and Which? magazine) and wrote Labour's 1945 manifesto, arguably the most revolutionary of the past century. He has founded 55 organisations, was the first to warn against the horrors of tower blocks and coined the phrases "meritocracy" and "globalisation". At 85 his mind and body are still fertile, being the father of a young daughter and the recent inventor of a new light.
He put the "do" into "gooding" but rather than snooze contentedly in the sun, this revered and moderate Labour peer worries about the power-crazed ways of a man he helped to manufacture: Tony Blair.
Today finds Young in agitated mood. He is the subject of a new biography by Asa Briggs, his fellow peer: "Perhaps I am overdoing it, but the impression is that the fellow being written about is dead." Anyone else would be flattered by the attention of such a distinguished historian; most would have retired satisfied after founding just one of Young's projects; but like all great reformers he is far too busy for his own funeral.
He could never have turned out conventional. The son of bohemians, he was packaged off to Dartington College, so progressive that lessons were optional and pupils were free to become entrepreneurs. Young found it "more fun" to run a poultry farm and flourished, inspired by a "beautiful young Irish girl" (the seeds of co-education were quickly sown).
With his parents "unsettled in their relationship", Dorothy Elmhirst, the college's wealthy American owner, took the teenage Michael for holidays with President Roosevelt: "He was very jovial but once I started an argument after he had sent a cruiser to Cuba. I told him that it was the worst type of gunboat diplomacy. At first he looked amazed, but then he got into the argument and we sat for half an hour arguing on the White House patio."
Inspired by the New Deal, he worked for a think tank called Political and Economic Planning. Asked to compare the 1945 manifesto that emerged with Blair's more recent effort, he says: "There is no comparison; that was a really meaty programme, everything was touched by the reforming spirit."
Except, it would seem, Labour's leaders: "They all thought Churchill would win easily." Not Young, who had been canvassing with his sociologist's clipboard. He was convinced that people were ready for socialism: "They felt worthy of full citizenship and entitled to social security after their contribution to the war."
Now, doesn't he accept that it was a disaster, stifling industry and saddling the country with debt? Pause: "I am not at all in favour of that view but I do accept it." Which I guess means that he agrees but wishes he didn't. "I did see, though not as clearly as I should, that industry needed to be free to make decisions rather than having to defer to the Treasury." Now he reckons that "government should be seen and not heard", quite a change from "the man in Whitehall knows best".
Returning to academia, he wrote two unlikely international bestsellers, one with the zippy title Family and Kinship in East London. Those who have never read Young assume that he was in favour of "meritocracy", but the creator of the phrase that defines the age was violently opposed, believing that it would lead to greed and arrogance, but without the guilt of aristocracy. History would agree with him on the destructiveness of tower blocks, but his eulogising of working-class culture - with all the naive enthusiasm that only a toff could muster - did much to keep Britain an ignorant and class-divided country. "Yes, I probably was guilty of romanticising the working classes," he says wistfully. "I didn't realise how narrow-minded they could be." A classic example of how the most intelligent can be the most blind.
Now he is far from romantic when it comes to the working-class thirst for knowledge. Incredibly, he regrets the abolition of the secondary modern school. "Academic achievement is too prized," he states, which is the nearest you can come to sacrilege.
"Schools are full of people who don't want to be there. There were riots at schools when they were made compulsory because parents didn't want to lose the labour," he says - almost approvingly. "To get a job in the docks you had to be able to swim 50 yards, which is why there are so many pools in the East End of London. What is the point of some of these children learning English literature?"
Ouch. Alas, he is probably right about the stupefying effect of some education. Yet the proposition that ideas are fit only for the middle class while the working class is taught to bash metal is so incredibly right wing that it could be advocated only by a monstrous old lefty.
Yet amid the lefty prescriptiveness we also have the seeds of "the customer is king". At its height, Which? had 4m readers and was sold for £40m (he claims never to have made a penny from the outfits he has founded). Wasn't he as responsible as anyone for the thrusting meritocrat, the compulsive consumer? "I may have had a small part in consumerism," he admits. "But people were fed up with austerity."
Not, it would seem, him: much of his life, although incredibly worthy, must have been rather, well, dull; too much time on dreary committees putting humanity to right, not enough time with the humans closest to him. He looks wounded but agrees. "Yes, I was too one-sided but I couldn't see it then. I love ideas," he says, fingering the latest report from Demos.
© Founding father: Young was in at the beginning of almost everything in post-war Britain. Now he has a five-year-old son Picture: Jeremy Young
He talks about how he can be lost for hours playing "without structure" with his five-year-old daughter, but the way he produced her could have come out of one of his old five-year plans: "I was very attached to my wife of 35 years, Sasha, and when she died I had this deep urge to create life to compensate. I was lucky to find a younger wife who was happy to go along with it." He published a touching poem about Sasha's death, yet after her funeral his first move was to set up the National Funeral College to improve the service provided by undertakers. This is not a normal man.
Indeed, there is a hint of crankiness, even battiness in some of his projects, ranging from the Argo Venture, devoted to human settlement in space, to the Baby Naming Society for those uncomfortable with christenings, to Grandparents Plus, conferring more rights of access on grandparents.
He belongs to that tradition of social reformers such as Robert Owen and the Webbs. Briggs wonders if he is "the last of the Victorians". He is certainly high-minded, but perhaps Briggs misses his mischievousness which is quite at odds with Gladstonian piety. I ask what motivates him and he smiles: "Vanity, a bit." He is that English brand of anarchist; so gentle that he is cocking a snook more than throwing a grenade: at Cambridge he suggested that staff from Battersea Polytechnic should take over a university laboratory during the holidays, principally to wind up his fellow dons. "That was very pleasant," he chortles.
What does he regret? "I was guilty of things I accused other people of, such as arrogance," he says, before taking another swipe at Briggs for failing to report the central point about his road away from Damascus. "I agree with everything I did in 1945 except the state. I have grown wary of bureaucracy." Which is like saying your faith is intact except you no longer believe in God.
The successor to the state, he hopes, is the voluntary sector, which is how he believes we can reconcile the conflict between individual and community. "I have been torn by that all my life. I set something up to work that out but we haven't really got anywhere," he says in self-reproach.
"The increasing power of the state has left people disengaged. Blair has made that worse by taking more power from within the country to compensate for the declining power that Britain has internationally. I am very disappointed by Labour."
It is a sad irony and not, I suspect, lost on someone as sensitive as Young that the generosity of public spirit that he personifies has been all but snuffed out by the state he helped to create.
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/06/03/stirevnws02010.html?
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