A thread about A Levels.
I was once told a story by someone who’d previously worked as a City exchange trader. He described his trading floor in the heady, post-Big-Bang days. /1

The sharp-suited working-class boys on the front line phones, he said, had a contemptuous nickname for the clueless scions of good schools and good families who invariably held the management positions above them... /2

...these privileged but intellectually-challenged recruits were kept far from the telephones where they could do any actual harm, and employed where their limited abilities, and their remuneration, could be suitably inflated. /3

‘Bistos’, the trader boys called them.
For those unfamiliar with the old slogan for the popular gravy product, Bisto Gravy was advertised as being “rich and thick”. /4

Now this was no class-war salvo. It was all friendly fire. These traders were no socialists! It was wry observation of a manifest reality. A judgement as hard-nosed as the trades they made. The barrow boy must make the money or be fired, but the Bisto would always be the boss. /5

I woke up thinking of that story. How these A Level calculations had enshrined, beautifully, a Bisto’s Charter: the inflation of grades for those alumni of good schools with limited ability, while algorithmically putting those upstart barrow boys and girls in their place. /6

We can all now look forward to the march of these clueless scions in years to come, stepping confidently from their newly-gained university places into the management offices of 21st Century Britain! /7

As to the rest of you overachieving but under-marked upstarts? Well, that rotting fruit won’t pick itself… //