Politicians like to exaggerate the differences among themselves because it’s helpful for fighting elections. Saying your opponents are the incarnation of evil tends to be more effective at rallying apathetic voters than admitting that the difference between you and your challenger may not amount to more than an emphasis here or a nuance there. But there is one thing almost all politicians claim to believe in: social mobility. The trouble is that over the last twenty years or so it has ground to a halt. Now the Coalition Government claims that promoting social mobility is 'the main goal of our social policy'. But what can be done about it?
There are, of course, some on the fringes of politics who think social mobility is a thoroughly bad idea. On the reactionary far right, some hanker after a feudal past in which everyone knew their place and no one wanted to change it. Some on the ideological left think the revolution will arrive only if there is a large and vibrant working class and regard the growth of the middle class and the shrinking of the working class as a victory for capitalism over socialism.
But most people belonging to our main political parties think social mobility a very good thing. They believe that where you end up in life should not depend on where you began it but rather on the effort you put into it. Disadvantage should not be a hindrance to bettering yourself and merit should be rewarded.
Where the parties have tended to differ is over how to achieve greater social mobility. Left-leaning politicians have focussed on the disadvantages of those at the bottom of the heap. In particular, though not exclusively, they have concentrated on differences of income between families and tried to narrow the differences by redistributing wealth, especially through the tax and benefit system. If there is greater economic equality at the start of life, then greater social mobility is likely to be the result.
Right-leaning politicians tend to disapprove of redistribution. They say you achieve social mobility by promoting greater equality of opportunity. Better education (especially bringing back grammar schools) and the freeing up of the market economy is the way to help people get on.
In fact, all governments have adopted a mix of the two approaches and for a time it seemed to work. In the thirty years or so after the Second World War, social mobility did indeed increase. The number of people who regarded themselves as middle class soared and meritocracy produced fast movement up and down the social strata. But recently this greater mobility has slowed down leaving policymakers scratching their heads about why and also about what to do.
Part of the problem is that many of the old approaches seem to have run their course. The last Labour government committed itself to ending child poverty by 2020 and made some progress in simple statistical terms. But despite the large sums spent on the policy, it has not produced the greater mobility hoped of it. Progress to the 2020 target has stalled and neither main party seems to think voters have the appetite in these difficult economic times for a much more redistributive tax system. It is no longer enough just to soak the rich to shift money to the poor because there are not enough of them to be soaked. It’s the middle class that has to be tapped and everyone seems to agree that the middle class are now 'squeezed'.
Similarly, although governments of both parties have increased the money spent on state education, any hope that this would lead the prosperous to turn their backs on private education has proved an illusion. If anything, people who can afford it (and those who barely can) are even keener to get their kids into public school than they used to be. And that brings lasting advantage. Although only 7% of secondary school pupils attend public schools, over 40% of students at the top universities come from fee-paying schools and the professions remain dominated by people educated at public schools.
Some on the left think the answer is to ban public schools or make them prohibitively expensive. Some on the right think the way forward is to reintroduce the eleven-plus and bring back the grammar schools that gave the public schools a run for their money. But neither is really practical politics.
Some social changes seem to have been pushing in the direction of less not more social mobility and to be proving far more powerful than anything governments can do to counter them. David Willetts, the universities minister with a reputation as one of the cleverest intellectuals in politics, got into hot water last weekend when he suggested that feminism had been probably the major factor in slowing social mobility and that it had 'trumped' egalitarianism.
Mr Willetts was immediately attacked for 'blaming' stalled social mobility on women. Yvette Cooper, who speaks for Labour on women’s issues as well as being shadow home secretary, dismissed his remarks as 'nonsense' and said that if the Government was serious about social mobility it should focus again on issues like child poverty.
But Mr Willetts was unrepentant. He said that he wasn’t blaming anyone and that he was wholly in favour of the greater opportunities which feminism had brought many women. His case was an analytic one.
He pointed out that there had been a huge increase in the number of women going to university in the last forty years or so, and that there were now more young women than young men in university. Because people with degrees tend to want to marry other people with degrees, this growth in the number of women graduates means that it has become easier for male graduates to find graduate wives, and so more of them do so. Both partners then tend to land the higher paid jobs available to graduates, both tend to stay in work and so their children have a double head start, so to speak, over the children of non-graduates. This is one important way social mobility is being thwarted, he argued.
What he was describing was the unforeseen consequence of a social change, the liberation of women, which is in itself almost universally approved. Neither he nor anyone else is suggesting that women shouldn’t go to university or that graduates shouldn’t be able to marry each other.
So what can governments do? On Tuesday, the Coalition made some suggestions for improving mobility 'for the middle, not just the bottom'. It wants to help those middle class families that 'can’t afford private education and lack the right connections'. It wants to curb the pulling-strings culture that helps children from well-connected backgrounds get unfair advantages over others. It’s proposing a compact with business to open up unpaid internships to young people of all backgrounds rather being available only to those with the right connections. The civil service will do the same. It wants to improve access to the best universities.
Critics have accused Government ministers, especially Nick Clegg, of hypocrisy over this. He has admitted that he himself was helped by his father’s connections to get a place in a Finnish bank when he was starting out. Furthermore, as recently as January, a Conservative party fundraising event auctioned an internship at a hedge fund to raise money. Even those sympathetic to what the Government is trying to do don’t imagine it is likely to be sufficient to get social mobility going again.
I suspect that politicians of all parties are a bit stumped on what to do to improve social mobility and are open to any ideas anyone might have. If you’ve got any, let them know.
What’s your view?
- Do you believe greater social mobility is a good thing or not?
- Why do you think it has stalled?
- What do you make of David Willetts’s argument that feminism may have trumped egalitarianism in thwarting social mobility? Should he have said it?
- Do you think we need a more redistributive tax and benefit system to promote social mobility or do you think that route has been explored as far as it can go?
- Do you think we should ban the public schools or bring back grammar schools?
- How effective do you think the measures the government has announced will be in promoting greater social mobility?
- Were ministers hypocritical to propose them?
- And what do you think would be the single most effective measure that could be taken to speed up social mobility?
