DOMINIC LAWSON

HOW strange it is that Alan Milburn should routinely have been described as the Government’s ‘social mobility tsar’, a grandiose title to which he never objected. After all, the Russian tsar was the apex of a system of absolute social hierarchy. Now our social mobility ‘ tsar’ has abdicated, protesting that the Government is doing nothing to bring about the more equal country that the Social Mobility Commission was designed to support.

In fact Milburn’s abdication is no more voluntary than that of Tsar Nicholas II, 100 years ago. As Justine Greening, the Education Secretary, pointed out yesterday, he’d been doing the job for five years ‘and his term had come to an end’.

In other words, Milburn jumped before he was pushed, and presented it as a resignation on a matter of principle.

In one respect, Milburn really did enjoy the status of a tsar: his pronouncements as chairman of the Social Mobility Commission were always accorded complete reverence — not least on the BBC — and were never subjected to any sort of critical review.

when this quango was launched in 2012 by the then coalition top team of David Cameron and Nick Clegg ( largely, I suspect, because both men were embarrassed by their own exclusively private education and wealthy backgrounds) Milburn declared: ‘we live in a country, where, invariably, if you’re born poor, you die poor.’

He repeated this on many occasions — and was never challenged on it by his many TV and radio interviewers.

But it is — and was — completely untrue. Even organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Trust and the Sutton Trust, both dedicated to the cause of increasing the life-chances of the less well-off, have produced research completely refuting Milburn’s central proposition.

Figures from the Rowntree Trust showed that 81 per cent of British males who grew up in families below the official poverty line ended up in adulthood with incomes above the poverty line.

Feared

And the most recent analysis by the Sutton Trust, dividing society into quartiles by income, revealed that 62 per cent of sons born to fathers in the bottom income quartile, themselves escaped into the higher three quartiles.

Moreover, as you would expect, there was social movement (as defined by income) in the opposite direction. Only 42 per cent of sons born to fathers from the top income bracket managed to retain that position in the highest income quartile — and 16 per cent of those born in the top income category slid all the way to the bottom.

In other words, Milburn was making it all up. why did he get away with it? well, the Conservatives didn’t dare criticise him because they feared — especially under David Cameron — that they would be seen as defending ‘elitism’. And for Labour, Milburn’s untruths were pleasantly in accord with their own claim that only a Labour government would represent ‘the many, not the few’. Funnily enough, it is within the Labour party — of which the former Cabinet minister Milburn is still a member — that there has been an actual retreat in working-class success.

In 1964, 37 per cent of Labour MPs were from a family background of manual work; by 2015 that figure had plunged to just 7 per cent.

This process is even accentuated by its current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as the resoundingly middle- class socialist pressure group Momentum tightens its hold on the selection process.

Ludicrous

On Saturday, the Mail reported ‘Labour insiders’ as saying that the son of a miner, Kieran Harpham, had been de-selected as a Sheffield councillor because he was ‘too authentically working-class’ and ‘not Left-wing enough’: he has been replaced by Janet Ridler, a historian from Sheffield’s wealthiest suburb, Dore.

To be fair to Alan Milburn, he is far from a Corbyn fan. He is, to the contrary, a Blairite. And, echoing his former boss, Milburn presented Brexit as a curse on British society, which must somehow be lifted. ‘Tough on Brexit, tough on the causes of Brexit,’ was Milburn’s ludicrous slogan yesterday — which is as much as to say that he thinks the British people’s decision to leave the EU was nothing less than a crime.

He went on to argue, confusingly, that if Theresa May didn’t do what he said about social mobility, she would be ‘betraying the families who voted for Brexit’.

His claim, such as it is, seems to be that those who voted to leave the EU did so as a protest against the nation’s lack of social mobility, and its alleged adverse effect on their living standards.

It is an assertion both presumptuous and pompous, based on no evidence. If anything, the pro-Brexit vote in the Labour heartlands was one in favour of greater social cohesion, and against the form of mobility defined by the EU’s absolute guarantee of freedom of movement.

The consequent unchecked level of immigration into the UK had many benefits, but the influx of millions of Europeans to work in this country also had a depressing effect on the wages of the unskilled. Such voters would, more likely, argue that the only way Mrs May could ‘betray’ them over Brexit would be to do what Mr Milburn wants and keep Britain inside the Single Market (which mandates freedom of movement).

But what is it, above anything else, which enables those from less well- off homes to have a chance of prosperity? A first- class quality of free education and the prospect of regular employment at the end of it. By both these measures, Britain has actually been upping its game — and it has nothing to do with Mr Milburn’s Social Mobility Commission.

Employment rates have been rising, for year after year, and the proportion of families without anyone in paid work has (thankfully) gone in the opposite direction — down. The latter has much to do with the benefit reforms pioneered by Iain Duncan Smith.

His colleague, Michael Gove, was also instrumental, as Education Secretary, in driving up standards in state schools by demanding a greater level of rigour in both teaching and examinations.

The result of this has been a narrowing of the quality gap — and public exam outcomes — between state schools and private schools.

Again, this was no thanks to the Social Mobility Commission. It had nothing useful to say about improving the standards of teaching, and instead advocated lowering standards of entry at our top universities to those from the poorest homes. what a counsel of despair.

Of course we are an unequal society. As are all societies in all nations, always. But despite the self-serving cliches of the Left, last year in the UK income inequality — defined as the gap between the earnings of the richest and the poorest — fell to its lowest level since 1986.

And, as the Chancellor Philip Hammond pointed out in his Budget speech a fortnight ago, since 2010 the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent have grown faster, proportionately, than the richest 10 per cent.

Obsessed

It’s true that we are in a long period of earnings stagnation: but this applies across the developed world. And it is simply not the case that Britain is at the bottom of the international league table in terms of social mobility.

we are probably more obsessed with class than any other nation, and accent still plays too much of a role in the way we treat each other.

But as Peter Saunders, emeritus professor of sociology at Sussex University explained in his recent Civitas pamphlet, Social Mobility Delusions: ‘Social mobility is the norm in Britain, not the exception, and it covers the range from top to bottom. Politicians say our social mobility rate is one of the lowest in the western world, but studies of class mobility put Britain around the middle of the international rankings.

‘The chances of moving into a different class than the one you were born into are less than in Sweden, the U. S. and Australia, but better than in Germany, France or Italy.’

So do we actually need a quango called the Social Mobility Commission?

we can certainly do without another social mobility ‘tsar’.