Society
When there's no more room at the top
Published 10 January 2008
If you move up, somebody will have to move down.
The real challenge for advocates of greater social mobility is not in pulling up the disadvantaged, but pulling down the advantaged. It is all very well to propose, for example, ways to get more children from poor homes into university. But does anybody really believe that middle-class parents won't find ways of keeping their children ahead?
It is to David Blunkett's credit that he acknowledges this dilemma in a new pamphlet published by Progress (The Inclusive Society? Social Mobility in 21st-Century Britain), even if he doesn't follow up with ideas for tackling it. When he grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, he writes, "social mobility was occurring on a significant scale, rarely downwards and mostly upwards". At that time, and for at least a decade afterwards, middle-class professions and occupations - law, teaching, financial services, media, medicine, for example - were expanding rapidly. People from the lower social strata could rise without anyone falling to make way. Of men born in the 1950s, more than three times as many moved up the social ladder as moved down. Social climbers such as Joe Lampton, the hero of a John Braine novel published in 1957, could easily find, in the novel's title, Room at the Top. That room could not expand indefinitely.
So it should be no surprise that, since Blunkett's youth, opportunities for social mobility have declined. This is universally agreed to be A Bad Thing, for which governments are somehow responsible. But changes in occupational structure, economic growth rates, and migration patterns have always had far more influence on social mobility than government policies such as favouring grammar schools or comprehensives. We should add the changing position of women.
Before the Second World War, a woman was more likely to move down the social scale than up, because her status was usually determined by her husband's. Since then, daughters of the middle classes, as well as upwardly mobile women, have taken university places and professional openings previously available to upwardly mobile men. If one form of social progress has gone into reverse, another has accelerated.
When we talk of declining mobility, we are really referring to a decline in absolute mobility: the number of people who move to a different class or income bracket from their parents. Relative mobility - the differences in the chances of people from different backgrounds ending up in a particular class or income bracket - was never high and has remained stable. During Blunkett's youth, while children from the lower social strata were pouring into the expanding professional classes - but leaving millions of their peers behind - those already at the top were consolidating their position.
Downward social mobility was once far more common than it is now. Of men born into social classes I and II at the beginning of the 20th century, barely half remained there in adulthood. (In Victorian novels, genteel fathers were in constant danger of "ruin".) Of those born in the 1950s, nearly three-quarters maintained their status. In other words, if the poor child now had a better chance of acquiring a silver spoon, those born with one had an equally improved chance of holding on to it.
New Labour's approach to social mobility is essentially to continue removing the barriers to upward movement, through, for example, increased investment in education and training. Blunkett's proposals are mostly along similar lines. They include five annual training days for all workers, "life mentors" for poorer pupils at school, an expanded child trust fund, translation of housing benefit into capital ownership and, more mysteriously, "a celebration event to mark the transition into adulthood . . . at age 16 or 18".
But it is no use breeding a new generation of Joe Lamptons for rooms at the top that are no longer available. The barriers to downward social mobility grow all the time. After securing the best schooling for their offspring - through exclusive state schools and private coaching, if not through paying fees - affluent parents finance postgraduate study and work experience to an extent unthinkable for those on lower incomes.
Far from removing the barriers to downward movement, new Labour has increased them by cutting taxes on investment income and, most recently, on inheritance and by encouraging (and doing everything to protect) asset inflation, notably in the housing market.
I am afraid Labour's approach to social mobility mirrors its approach to almost everything else. It wants to make the omelette without breaking eggs: better public services without higher taxes, fewer carbon emissions without stopping anybody flying, affordable homes without a fall in house prices, more upward social mobility without downward mobility.
It's a pity that even Blunkett, now with the freedom of a backbencher, cops out of a tough choice.
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