The quiet death rattle of social mobility
January 12th, 2010 by Moussa Haddad Posted in attitudes, equality, livelihoods, uk poverty
An interesting article by Will Hutton in Sunday’s Observer adds to the slow trickle of discussion around social mobility, set off by Alan Milburn’s report on ‘access to the professions’. More often than not, it’s a debate that’s being seen through the prism of the ‘politics of envy’, and ‘class war’. Public attitudes, though, seem a touch more nuanced – with a sense that there is too much inequality sitting alongside a tolerance of ‘deserved inequalities’.
Belatedly, this government has spent some of what is probably its last year trying to legislate against the class system. Yet it isn’t clear that this approach will achieve much, while income and particularly wealth are increasingly concentrated at the top, and the wider government attitude seems to be to blame people for their own poverty. Meanwhile, social mobility continues to grind to a halt, and wealth is more and more passed down through the generations rather than earned – with the effect of the recession increasingly to close off housing wealth to those unable to draw on parental financial assistance.
All in all, this article is somewhat sobering. It also says that it’s time the debate moved on from the barking out of catchphrases – like ‘Tory toff’ and ‘politics of envy’ – designed to shut down debate, and to a mature discussion of whether we want a fairer, more meritocratic society, or to continue down the road to a society in which where you end up is increasingly determined by where you began.
