The former higher education minister's article is spot on in stressing class ahead of race as the key barrier to opportunity when it comes to getting into Oxbridge colleges
A nice chap, David Lammy. I once did him a terrible disservice by idly speculating at the end of an interview early in his political career that he might be Britain's first black prime minister. More recently the bad fairy has cast a similar hex on Chuka Umunna, new MP for Streatham, who has been called "the British Obama", poor chap. They will struggle to shake off such unhelpful burdens.
What do their stories tell us about opportunities open to racial minorities in modern Britain? Not a lot. They are both lawyers who were smart enough to escape modest surroundings – Lammy's lovely voice took him to choir school, Umunna seems to have family connections – into private education and on the path to success.
As it happens, neither went to Oxford or Cambridge, but it doesn't seem to have held them back. So what does Lammy's article about Oxbridge access in today's Guardian tell us about our premier elite universities?
The former higher education minister's article is spot on, as the page one story's headline is not, in stressing class ahead of race – they interact – as the key barrier to opportunity. "Just one British black Caribbean student was admitted to Oxford last year. That is not a misprint," the MP for Tottenham writes.
That's pretty awful, though there is a complication, which Jeevan Vasagar's article highlights. I'll come back to it. Cambridge did a little better, but employs not a single black academic. That immediately reminds the reader that Cambridge too has some work to do, but also that we need more definition here: who does David Lammy exactly mean by that flexible term "black"?
Obviously not Amartya Sen, because he was master of Trinity the last time I looked, admittedly a while back because the saintly Nobel prize economist went back to Harvard in 2004.
His CV, incidentally, has an important class component: the Sens are a very distinguished Bengali family. It helps. Ditto Paul Boateng, a tearaway in his youth, but a well-connected one.
My hunch would be, as Lammy's article suggests, that Oxbridge and other Russell Group elite universities do quite well in the drive to greater diversity if attention is focused less narrowly than the "British black Caribbean."
It is a particular category of struggling students, one which would, incidentally, include Lammy – of Guyanan stock – but not Umunna, who is of Nigerian/British/Irish heritage.
Tricky, isn't it? It usually is. British-Indians, British-Chinese, British Jews, British-Irish, British-Gujarati-East African, all sorts of traditionally ambitious groups of new arrivals probably do quite well in Russell group university applications.
As noted here before, British Guyanans, their parents raised in a notably good school system, have been conspicuously high-achieving in British society – up to cabinet rank. Go on, look up Valerie Amos.
But back to the class dimension. As Lammy says, Oxbridge doesn't do well there either. The middle and upper classes get a disproportionate share of places and the colleges don't – as Harvard has learned to do – go out and actively recruit smart poor kids of whatever colour.
Let's not leave north-south geography out of the equation either. The bourgeois London borough of Richmond gets more such places than northern towns like Barnsley, Middlesbrough and Stoke. Oxford offered only 18 fewer places to Richmond kids than it did to the whole of Scotland.
But before we get carried away, let's also acknowledge ingredients that are within the power of applicants and their teachers to change. Diverging patterns of tuition fees may – may – be going to make it harder for Scots, Irish or Welsh students to come to English universities, or make them think it's not worth the extra bother.
But plenty don't come south because they don't want to come south. Ditto kids from the north. Don't I remember hearing that Nottingham gets a very high rate of applicants because it's as far north as the southern softies will risk going – surely lots go to Edinburgh, Durham, Newcastle and York? – and as far south as the Grims will venture. ("Grims", as in "it's grim up north": a northern students' joke, I think.)
Then there is aspiration. I've written here before that my wife, who left school at 15, had to encourage her cousin to let his state school daughter apply to Cambridge despite his concerns that it "wasn't for us". She got a place and later got a first. What does my wife's diffident cousin do for a living? Lorry driver? No, he's a professor at another distinguished Russell Group university.
If someone with a PhD and a lifetime in academe can misjudge his kids' chances, how hard must it be for the lorry driver, black or white? Which is where the attitude of schools come in and where Vasagar's report contained a startling detail, which may explain a lot.
Oxford's spokesman told my colleague that "black students apply disproportionately for the most oversubscribed subjects" – namely economics and management, medicine and maths.
Naturally competition is very fierce and they lower their own chances before they open their mouths at that difficult interview – some of which are conducted by psychopaths from what I have heard down the years.
So someone is badly advising those aspirant doctors, economists and maths students. Who? Let's assume that parents don't know any better – mine certainly didn't in distant Cornwall – so it's surely down to the advice given by schools, some of which are unambitious for their students.
A young man I know applied to read classics at Cambridge because he knew how unfashionable the subject had become. He got in too. That's how things are done on the inside track. That's what Alan Milburn was banging on about in his report on dwindling life chances in the post-Thatcher era.
Oddly enough, Nick Clegg is known to be sensitive to the quirks of the British class system because his Dutch mother looked down on it with distaste. He says his tuition fees package will help poor kids, not hinder them.
Since even David Lammy – University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and Harvard Law – looks to the market-orientated US, not to Europe, as a model for what could be achieved for minorities here, Clegg should be making a better job of persuasion.