Most people would like to live in a society that is fair, where merit is rewarded and every child in every part of the country has a similar chance of health and happiness. Most of us recognise that however much successive governments declare their intention of working towards this ambition, the goal gets no nearer. Austerity has fallen unequally. The number of children in poverty, which fell by a third in the decade after 2000, is now expected to be back above 3 million by 2020. A new report from Professor Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, shows poverty and inequality wrecking health. New analysis of university entrants suggests that black and minority ethnic applicants still struggle to get into Russell Group universities. And Alan Milburn’s social mobility commission has done groundbreaking research showing that working-class kids who leap all the barriers and make it in to the top professions still don’t get on as fast or earn as much as their more privileged peers. It adds up to a world in which disadvantage is becoming entrenched.
Since 2010, policymakers have been thinking less about poverty than about social mobility. Others see life chances, the possibilities open to every citizen from cradle to grave, as the best way of measuring progress. These distinctions of terminology matter: they shape the way we think about the answers. But none of them seems quite complete on its own. There is a clear link between low-income families and the appeal of cheap, filling food that tends to lead obesity and the kind of outcomes Professor Modi describes, where Britain’s level of infant and child mortality is among the worst in western Europe. But it doesn’t account for the level of smoking in pregnancy – three times higher in Northern Ireland than in Lithuania, where the per capita income is only a fraction of the UK’s, or why babies in Norway are twice as likely to be breastfed as they are in Britain.
And at the other end of the scale, it certainly isn’t poverty that accounts for the findings in the latest report from the social mobility commission which suggest that if you come from a working-class background, with parents in routine or semi-routine manual work, you are much less likely to get a job in the so-called senior professions of medicine or academia; a contemporary from a professional or managerial background is 2.5 times more likely to be taken on. You are also much less likely to be in the top income bracket. According to the report, professionals in, say, law (and journalism) who come from working-class backgrounds earn more than £2,000 a year less than their peers from professional backgrounds. The report’s authors think they have identified a “class ceiling”.
If it is not only merit that brings success even in areas of work that appear to be all about brains, it is clear that something else is in play. Politics hasn’t had much to say about class and social policy since the early 1990s. It didn’t fit with new Labour being relaxed about the filthy rich. The silence has allowed practices that are indirectly discriminatory – such as computerised application forms that weight educational background as well as achievement, for example – to become embedded; it has legitimised the unpaid internships and the networks that filter out the less well connected. It is beginning to look as if class belongs right back in the political mix.
The Guardian view on social mobility: the class ceiling | Editorial
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