This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

There are three professions which, historically, have been called vocations. People are “called” to medicine, to the bar, and to the priesthood. This probably reflects the fact that these were, historically, the three professions for which you trained at the ancient universities. 

Clergy have the second highest suicide rate of any job or profession in the country

But it also spoke of a particular relationship between the professionals and those they serve and an obligation to minister, each in our particular callings, to those who present themselves to us.

And over the last few years two of those three professions have gone out on strike. Alone among the three, the priesthood hasn’t gone on strike. Which, by the way, has nothing to do with our conditions of service. 

The Church of England is a terrible employer, with a way of treating its clergy and volunteers that is so appalling that it would be protesting outside its Church House headquarters if it were not, in fact, the Church of England. 

Clergy have the second highest suicide rate of any job or profession in the country, much of which can be blamed (and has been blamed in reputable studies) on the actively evil Clergy Discipline Measure, which the bishops freely admit is not “fit for purpose” (a weasel term if ever there was one) but which they continue to use nonetheless.

But the clergy won’t be going out on strike, despite taking a 5 per cent pay cut this year and having seen our pensions secretly whittled away and seeing more and more colleagues burn out as an increasing number of churches are imposed on them that they could never hope to manage. 

We won’t be going on strike because the people we would hurt would be our own flock, not the bishops or the finance teams in the diocese or the national church. It would be the people we live among and pray among and worship alongside that we would be depriving of the sacraments, of counsel before they die, of prayers at their wedding.

That junior doctors and criminal barristers have taken the plunge into industrial action is something that should worry everyone, well beyond the specific questions of pay or service being debated.

If we went back 50 years and told people that doctors and barristers would go on strike, they would look at us as if we were insane. These are professionals, on good salaries, who will turn out, in rain or shine, to vote Tory.

Just writing that shows how much we’ve changed. Take voting Tory: I hardly know a junior barrister or a junior doctor who votes Tory. We can blame Brexit, or a left-coded education system, or whatever else we want, but it’s now a statement of fact that this is a demographic very unlikely to be Right-leaning.

And for that we really need to think about what has happened to the professional classes — the junior doctors and barristers and their friends in similar professions. Look at them in contrast to their forebears — metaphorically (those who went before them in their jobs) and literally (their parents). 

Let’s start with the obvious: they cannot begin to imagine owning (or even living in) the kind of houses their forebears enjoyed; they cannot imagine being able to start a family at the kind of age that they were conceived at; they cannot imagine how to afford childcare should they attempt to start a family; they could not imagine sending their children to the kind of schools it was de rigueur for the professional classes to send their children to only a generation ago.

The primary relationship of the professional is with the state

I realise that an article about the plight of the upper middle classes brings out an orchestra of the tiniest violins in the world, but before you descend into shrieks of derision, hear me out. Revolutions don’t happen because the poor are angry; they happen because the middle classes are. 

And our middle class is seething, and they are seething because all the things that they expected if they did well at school, did well at university, and went into a well-respected profession are comprehensively beyond their means.

On top of that there has been a shift in what it means to be a professional. Let’s take a look at those strikes. One of the reasons why we are seeing these categories of employee go on strike in this generation is a shift in these professions towards being, effectively, civil servants (or working much of the time as civil servants) — where pay is set not by the client or, really, in any way reflecting your particular ability or employability, but by the state, according to one-size-fits-all models that bear no relationship to what these doctors or lawyers actually do or need. The primary relationship of the professional is with the state, not with the client or patient.

And so the social contract — by which the people who ensure that our lives and liberties are well looked after are looked after well — has crumbled. The relationships, duties, responsibilities, vocations, which were the outworking of that social contract, are crumbling too. Somehow, we have to find ways reconnecting it all.