Introduction: Meritocracy in Perspective. The Rise of the Meritocracy 60 Years On

Sixty years after its publication, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy remains one of the most important texts for understanding the changing intellectual politics of postwar Britain. Young’s fictional vision of a meritocratic society explores the consequences of a society where each citizen is judged according to the formula ‘I.Q. + Effort = Merit’. The successful meritocrats hoard ever-greater rewards for themselves, crystallising into a rigid and repressive elite who rule over an increasingly powerless and depressed underclass. While the concept has evolved and adapted, the language of meritocracy is one of the great survivors of postwar British politics. In an age characterised by the rise of populist leaders and movements, as well as a backlash against educated ‘liberal elites’, revisiting, reinterpreting and re-evaluating Young’s influential satire and the central place the concept of meritocracy occupies in the history of postwar Britain has never been more important.     

Locating,Identifying, and Comparing Sub‐visible Paint Particles

Forensic paint comparisons are generally conducted on samples which, while small relative to their source, are still visible to the unaided eye and are thus located and analyzed without great difficulty. Here we demonstrate that a more detailed examination of candidate transfer surfaces can capture materials (questioned samples), even when such traces are invisible to the unaided eye. While certain analytical details (such as layer sequence or a pure FTIR spectrum) may not be obtainable from such traces due to their size and condition, a detailed analysis of the sample characteristics that are analytically accessible may still provide sufficient analytical data to arrive at a probative result. Here we present the application of this approach to a suspected paint transfer case, involving particles of paint as small as 40 μm in size. Using a combination of stereomicroscopy, polarized light microscopy, infrared microspectroscopy, Raman microspectroscopy, and SEM/EDS, all performed on a single, subsample of the original minute particle, it was possible to demonstrate evidence of a two‐way transfer between the suspected sources. Furthermore, the transferred paint particle in one direction could be classified as automotive in nature based on a combination of polymer composition, microscopic texture, and pigment package (which included three specifically identified pigments). This work demonstrates (i) the potential for improving detection limits when searching for a questioned sample, (ii) the potential benefits of higher resolution analyses on samples that would be traditionally labeled as “sample‐size limited,” and (iii) the value of case‐specific interpretation over standardized, one‐size fits all report templates.