Show some politicians a microphone and they will sooner or later (usually sooner) plant both their feet in their mouth before falling flat on their backside.
Step forward into the spotlight of stupidity then Oliver Letwin, occasional Cabinet Office Minister and full time Tory caricature. This week his contribution to the debate on airport expansion was to signal his opposition on the grounds that building more airports would only encourage the poor to move around; or as he put it ‘we don’t want more families from Sheffield flying off on cheap holidays.’
It was the sort of remark that, like Peter Mandelson’s about New Labour being intensely relaxed about some people becoming ‘filthy rich’, will come back to haunt his party over and over again; not least because a throwaway remark seems to contain some damning truths about his party’s values.
Add to this the research by the University of California published this week claiming that social mobility in Britain is now slower than it was during the middle ages and the mess Nick Clegg got into in his attempts to address ingrained privilege and said truths start o thunder towards you over the horizon like the Star Wars credits.
Professor Gregory Clarke of the University of California told politics.co.uk on Monday ‘the huge social resources spent on publicly provided education and health have seemingly created no gains in the rate of social mobility’; and that ‘The modern meritocracy is no better at achieving social mobility than the medieval oligarchy. Instead the rate seems to be a constant of social physics beyond the control of social engineering.’
It is possible to disagree with both points, for much of the past couple of hundred years improving public health and access to education has led to a corresponding improvement in the lives of all Britons regardless of class. Diseases of the sort that stalked the fetid streets of pre Victorian cities didn’t differentiate on class lines who they infected, so improving sanitation benefited rich and poor alike; compulsory education made the industrial advances of the nineteenth century and the prosperity they brought possible, the tragedy lay then in the inequality with which the wealth was distributed.
Where things have gone wrong is in the past half century, old industries that offered working people the chance to rise above their origins have contracted and for all but the lucky few social mobility has hit the buffers with a sickening thud. Fear not though, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has taken up the fight for equality and announced in the commons the setting up of a ‘child poverty and social mobility commission,’ for good measure he then laid into ‘sharp elbowed’ upper middle class parents who use their influence and contacts to land their children plum internships that provide the experience necessary to embark on high flying careers.
In the resulting debate, as reported by the Guardian, Clegg fell foul of Labour’s Harriet Harman who accused him of ‘betraying a generation of young people’ and said that he had ‘lost the right to pontificate on social mobility when he abolished the educational maintenance allowance and trebled tuition fees.’ In coalition Britain, she said social mobility now meant getting ‘a bus to the job centre,’ not exactly a rib tickler even by Ms Harman’s low standards, but enough to make the Deputy PM stagger back to his corner rather unsteadily at the end of the round.
He managed though, as is often the way with poor old Cleggy these days, to provide the knock out punch himself. It seems that the brave opponent of sharp elbows and undeserved privilege got his own start in life thanks to family patronage; oops! Cue much embarrassment and a flurry of mocking headlines in the tabloids, open mouth, insert foot; business as usual.
When the tears of laughter dried though the problems of social mobility not just stopping but being thrown into reverse were still there and the politicians don’t know what to do about it. Before the party managers hustled him off out of sight like an embarrassing uncle at a family gathering Oliver Letwin gave a hint that the Tories don’t really care about social mobility, even though they nod and make approving noises when earnest Iain Duncan Smith (another embarrassing uncle?) mentions it and why would they, their reason for existing is to protect privilege.
Labour should care though and in their way I suppose they do, but they certainly don’t understand the frustrations of being forever at the back of the queue. These days there are precious few horny handed sons and daughters of toil on the Labour benches and internal party prejudices prevent local parties from communicating with the gilded elite in their Hampstead ivory towers.
Britain is a democracy and privilege can’t be abolished by force and even if it could few would want that to happen. What people want is a level playing field, they want to see an economy based on manufacturing industries that provide talented working class boys and girls with the chance to get ahead if they want to or to earn a decent living if they don’t; they want to see local government given real power to bring about change based on what communities want not what big government backed by bigger business thinks they should have and they want to see fewer people like Oliver Letwin and more like Alan Johnson in parliament.
If they’re serious about reversing the decline in social mobility David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Milliband and the rest of our ‘political class’ know what needs to be done; but do they have the guts to do it? I won’t hold my breath.
Showing posts with label social-mobility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social-mobility. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Harman’s class act.
This week Harriet Harman, long since identified as the standard bearer for all things out of touch and politically correct in the demonology on modern British politics, did something that requires considerable courage; she broached the subject of social class and its influence on the life chances of individuals.
In a speech made to left leaning think tank Compass last Thursday she said, ahead of a government sponsored report due to be released next week, that while she recognised the continued presence of racial and gender related prejudice there was ‘overarching and interweaving with these a persistent inequality of social class.’
The report is expected to show that children from poorer backgrounds are less well prepared to start school and that the average lifespan in wealthy areas is thirteen years longer than in disadvantaged ones. She went on to say the government had used ‘public policy interventions to halt the rising tide of inequality,’ much of which she said had been created during the years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997.
Responding to the speech Ms Harman’s Tory shadow Theresa May said that ‘over the past twelve years social mobility has stalled’ and claimed that faced with this all the Labour Party could do was ‘reach for the old fashioned response of class war.’
A Tory government, she said, would ‘deal with the causes of poverty and inequality, including educational failure, family breakdown and worklessness.’
In a week when the nation recoiled in horror from the details of the brutal attack carried out by two boys, aged respectively ten and eleven, in the former mining town of Edlington the hysterical tone of the debate may come across as distasteful but its subject matter is no less pertinent.
For the past quarter of a century social class, specifically the seemingly unstoppable growth of a feral underclass has been a subject nobody has wanted to talk about. The Tories tried to distract attention from it by claiming to have abolished the class system by allowing people to buy their council housed, the small matter of social housing being needed for a reason and if it disappears the problems it provided for will only become worse doesn’t seem to have registered on their radar. New Labour, as part of its admittedly brilliant marketing strategy under Tony Blair in the mid nineties sold everybody the notion that we’re all middle class now, at least we were so long as their new friends in the city kept coming through with limitless credit. Now that credit has dried up many of the people who maxed out their cards trying to ‘live the dream’ have got a ringside seat as it turns into a nightmare.
Recently class has made it back onto the agenda with David Cameron promising in his speech to the Tory party conference that the Conservatives would be the ‘party of the poor’, to date though his prescription for mending ‘broken Britain’ seems to consist of little more than a lukewarm promise of a tax break for married couples. There are people on the right talking sensibly about tackling inequality such as former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, but, like Labour’s Frank Field in the nineties, he is likely to be relegated to the fringes of the party once it returns to government.
The real burden of tackling social inequality rests with the Labour Party because issues of class are the reason for its existence. They are also what could bring about its destruction since the areas where the greatest hardships have been felt over the past quarter century also happen to be, nominally at least, Labour strongholds.
In her awkward, right-on way Harriet Harman seems to have recognised that Labour has to start talking about class, it’s too late for doing so to save them from losing the coming election, but it might just give the party a foundation upon which to build a new identity, one based on policy rather than the dark arts of spin.
In a speech made to left leaning think tank Compass last Thursday she said, ahead of a government sponsored report due to be released next week, that while she recognised the continued presence of racial and gender related prejudice there was ‘overarching and interweaving with these a persistent inequality of social class.’
The report is expected to show that children from poorer backgrounds are less well prepared to start school and that the average lifespan in wealthy areas is thirteen years longer than in disadvantaged ones. She went on to say the government had used ‘public policy interventions to halt the rising tide of inequality,’ much of which she said had been created during the years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997.
Responding to the speech Ms Harman’s Tory shadow Theresa May said that ‘over the past twelve years social mobility has stalled’ and claimed that faced with this all the Labour Party could do was ‘reach for the old fashioned response of class war.’
A Tory government, she said, would ‘deal with the causes of poverty and inequality, including educational failure, family breakdown and worklessness.’
In a week when the nation recoiled in horror from the details of the brutal attack carried out by two boys, aged respectively ten and eleven, in the former mining town of Edlington the hysterical tone of the debate may come across as distasteful but its subject matter is no less pertinent.
For the past quarter of a century social class, specifically the seemingly unstoppable growth of a feral underclass has been a subject nobody has wanted to talk about. The Tories tried to distract attention from it by claiming to have abolished the class system by allowing people to buy their council housed, the small matter of social housing being needed for a reason and if it disappears the problems it provided for will only become worse doesn’t seem to have registered on their radar. New Labour, as part of its admittedly brilliant marketing strategy under Tony Blair in the mid nineties sold everybody the notion that we’re all middle class now, at least we were so long as their new friends in the city kept coming through with limitless credit. Now that credit has dried up many of the people who maxed out their cards trying to ‘live the dream’ have got a ringside seat as it turns into a nightmare.
Recently class has made it back onto the agenda with David Cameron promising in his speech to the Tory party conference that the Conservatives would be the ‘party of the poor’, to date though his prescription for mending ‘broken Britain’ seems to consist of little more than a lukewarm promise of a tax break for married couples. There are people on the right talking sensibly about tackling inequality such as former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, but, like Labour’s Frank Field in the nineties, he is likely to be relegated to the fringes of the party once it returns to government.
The real burden of tackling social inequality rests with the Labour Party because issues of class are the reason for its existence. They are also what could bring about its destruction since the areas where the greatest hardships have been felt over the past quarter century also happen to be, nominally at least, Labour strongholds.
In her awkward, right-on way Harriet Harman seems to have recognised that Labour has to start talking about class, it’s too late for doing so to save them from losing the coming election, but it might just give the party a foundation upon which to build a new identity, one based on policy rather than the dark arts of spin.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Time to break through the glass ceiling.
Social mobility in modern Britain has ground to a halt with professions such as the law, medicine and journalism increasingly closed to anyone unlucky enough not to be born with a silver spoon in their mouth. This was the sad conclusion drawn by a report chaired by former minister Alan Milburn published this week.
Children from poor backgrounds, it concluded, need more encouragement and better careers advice to help them realise their full potential. Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning Mr Milburn said of the government’s attempts to level the educational playing field over the past twelve years ‘We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we’ve broken through it yet.’
Too many professions, he said, still operated a ‘closed shop’ mentality when it came to recruitment and what was needed was a ‘great wave of social mobility’ to match that of the 50’s and 60’s that would lift talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds into previously closed professions.
Critics of the report, unsurprisingly, cited the decline and fall of the grammar school system from the sixties onwards as the chief driver behind the stalling of social mobility. Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts spoke for the majority of people on this side of the argument when he said, also to the BBC, ‘if only you brought selection back into state schools and as a result had a decent education system’ people from poor families would be able to ‘power through’ the glass ceiling.
In response Alan Milburn said that selection had worked when there were 250,000 students studying at Britain’s universities, but was no longer applicable at a time when student numbers have swelled to 2.5million.
As ever in matters such as this both sides get some important things right whilst at the same time ignoring much that is important, but, from their respective standpoint, inconvenient.
Alan Milburn is right to point out the extent to which the professions are still stuffy, clannish and disposed towards looking backwards and that in a modern society they should be representative on the social mix of the country in the same way they should of the mix regarding race, gender and disability. This isn’t a radical departure, its just basic common sense.
Quentin Letts and the legions of people who support the reintroduction of grammar schools make a valid point, however much the idealists dislike it selection will always have a role to play in education. When we try to make everybody equal we inevitably end up rounding standards down and preventing talent from flourishing, a high price to pay for ideological purity.
Both sides of the argument seem to ignore though one major point, social mobility cannot simply be commanded from the centre, it depends to a large part on the behaviour of individuals, and, sad to say, too many people remain on the bottom rung of the ladder because they choose, consciously or not, to do so.
We are all, quite rightly, concerned by the chronic underachievement of many members of what used to be called the white working class, not least because it has been a major contributing factor in the rise and rise of the far right in some of Britain’s most disadvantaged areas. It can, I would guess, be attributed to one key factor, the near total collapse of aspiration amongst the same social group.
This can be seen in the unwillingness of white working class boys to engage with education for fear of seeming to have diminished their masculinity by doing so, and in the number of girls from similar backgrounds who would rather be ‘famous’, than clever. It is a shocking testament to the shrinking of horizons that has taken place over the past fifty years.
It wasn’t always so, within living memory education was prized highly by working class people, every mining village and mill town had its own institute and library filled with working people determined to better themselves through learning. It goes without saying that these people wanted their children to do even better than they had, and to their credit many of them did too.
This government and the next should take heed of Alan Milburn’s report, central government can do a great deal to improve careers advice and to make sure children leave school with the skills and qualifications to get good jobs, but it can’t act alone. Individuals must take more responsibility for their progress and that made by their children. Making room at the top is not enough on its own, people must be encouraged to make the sacrifices necessary to climb the ladder.
Children from poor backgrounds, it concluded, need more encouragement and better careers advice to help them realise their full potential. Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday morning Mr Milburn said of the government’s attempts to level the educational playing field over the past twelve years ‘We have raised the glass ceiling but I don’t think we’ve broken through it yet.’
Too many professions, he said, still operated a ‘closed shop’ mentality when it came to recruitment and what was needed was a ‘great wave of social mobility’ to match that of the 50’s and 60’s that would lift talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds into previously closed professions.
Critics of the report, unsurprisingly, cited the decline and fall of the grammar school system from the sixties onwards as the chief driver behind the stalling of social mobility. Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts spoke for the majority of people on this side of the argument when he said, also to the BBC, ‘if only you brought selection back into state schools and as a result had a decent education system’ people from poor families would be able to ‘power through’ the glass ceiling.
In response Alan Milburn said that selection had worked when there were 250,000 students studying at Britain’s universities, but was no longer applicable at a time when student numbers have swelled to 2.5million.
As ever in matters such as this both sides get some important things right whilst at the same time ignoring much that is important, but, from their respective standpoint, inconvenient.
Alan Milburn is right to point out the extent to which the professions are still stuffy, clannish and disposed towards looking backwards and that in a modern society they should be representative on the social mix of the country in the same way they should of the mix regarding race, gender and disability. This isn’t a radical departure, its just basic common sense.
Quentin Letts and the legions of people who support the reintroduction of grammar schools make a valid point, however much the idealists dislike it selection will always have a role to play in education. When we try to make everybody equal we inevitably end up rounding standards down and preventing talent from flourishing, a high price to pay for ideological purity.
Both sides of the argument seem to ignore though one major point, social mobility cannot simply be commanded from the centre, it depends to a large part on the behaviour of individuals, and, sad to say, too many people remain on the bottom rung of the ladder because they choose, consciously or not, to do so.
We are all, quite rightly, concerned by the chronic underachievement of many members of what used to be called the white working class, not least because it has been a major contributing factor in the rise and rise of the far right in some of Britain’s most disadvantaged areas. It can, I would guess, be attributed to one key factor, the near total collapse of aspiration amongst the same social group.
This can be seen in the unwillingness of white working class boys to engage with education for fear of seeming to have diminished their masculinity by doing so, and in the number of girls from similar backgrounds who would rather be ‘famous’, than clever. It is a shocking testament to the shrinking of horizons that has taken place over the past fifty years.
It wasn’t always so, within living memory education was prized highly by working class people, every mining village and mill town had its own institute and library filled with working people determined to better themselves through learning. It goes without saying that these people wanted their children to do even better than they had, and to their credit many of them did too.
This government and the next should take heed of Alan Milburn’s report, central government can do a great deal to improve careers advice and to make sure children leave school with the skills and qualifications to get good jobs, but it can’t act alone. Individuals must take more responsibility for their progress and that made by their children. Making room at the top is not enough on its own, people must be encouraged to make the sacrifices necessary to climb the ladder.
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