“poshness test” is allegedly being applied by top British companies to exclude members of the lower orders from even getting a start in them. The claim comes from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, chaired by Alan Milburn, a former Labour minister. In a previous report by the commission, Mr Milburn referred to Britain as a “closed shop society” and said “birth, not worth, has become more and more a determinant of people’s life chances”.
But while he and other politicians have argued that there are high barriers to success for outsiders in Britain, one can’t help noticing that, despite being a “closed shop”, well over 300,000 French people have come to work over here, many of them in jobs so well-paid that they are crowding out South Kensington. A similar or even greater deluge of Italians also suggests they find the barriers not so great as to preclude advancement here.
We have also recently learnt that Britain is the pre-eminent hub in Europe for technology start-ups, which again, suggests that upper-class toffs are not keeping everyone else down. And we have quite a few home-grown successes who have come from modest circumstances. Sir Terence Leahy came from a housing estate to be head of Tesco. Lord Sugar made a fortune, despite starting on a stall in the East End. In recent times, we have also had a grocers’ daughter for a prime minister as well as a working-class lad from Brixton.
So what is the truth of the matter?
It depends which measure of social mobility you like to use. “Absolute social mobility” is based on progress up or down the scale of occupations. On this basis, there has been terrific social mobility over the past century. Half or more of us have been changing our occupational class positions – either up or down – compared with our fathers. This is partly due to the way, a century ago, three quarters of us were working class and only a quarter were middle class. Now those proportions have been turned on their head: there has been a huge movement from working-class to middle-class occupations.
One of the biggest studies of social mobility, in 1983, divided occupations into three classes: working class, intermediate class and the salaried class. It found that 22 per cent of the children of those in the lowest class progressed right up to the highest class.
Today four out of five children who grow up in poor households do not end up poor themselves, according to the Rowntree Foundation. Professor Peter Saunders, a respected sociologist, has argued: “Social mobility is the norm in Britain, not the exception, and it covers the range from top to bottom.”
OK, so social mobility may appear on this basis to be pretty good. But what if we were to compare Britain with other countries? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) surveyed the international evidence in 2007 and concluded that Sweden, Canada and Norway were “the more fluid countries” while the “most rigid” nations were Germany, Ireland, Italy and France. As for Britain, rather boringly, it fell in between, along with the United States. When it comes to international comparisons, we don’t need to beat ourselves up. We are run of the mill – more or less average.
What about educational mobility? A child who goes to a top private or grammar school will certainly get a better education than one who goes to a “bog standard” comprehensive in a bad part of town. But is Britain worse than other countries in this respect? Again the answer is “no”. Britain is ninth best out of 30 countries in achieving educational success for children independently of the parents’ socio-economic status, according to a comprehensive OECD study in 2010.
Across advanced countries, the background of parents accounts for 14 per cent of the variation in reading scores. The figure for Britain is 13.8 per cent.
There is some evidence on the other side. This comes from measuring incomebased social mobility. Academics have tried to calculate how far the income of children is different from that of their parents. The Sutton Trust has employed economists from the London School of Economics to make some studies and on the basis of these has concluded that Britain performs worse than most other advanced countries.
The trouble is that the data is highly unreliable. The OECD has said “these comparisons can be invalid because different studies use different variable definitions, samples, estimation methods and time periods”. One basic problem in most countries is that it is impossible to get reliable information about what the parents of those people being studied were earning a generation ago. With such big statistical difficulties, even the author of a Sutton Trust report has said that, as a result, it is “unclear how these countries should be ranked”.
Undaunted by these cautionary words, our politicians have used these unreliable figures to assert that Britain is at the bottom end of social mobility. Not all the studies agree on incomes anyway. According to one academic, Stephen Gorard, 17 per cent of those born to the poorest quarter of families end up in the richest quarter. That is a remarkable figure.
One should probably stick with the more reliable evidence on occupational mobility which shows that Britain is good in general and average compared with other countries. That being so, why do politicians and pundits set aside the evidence and talk as though we were a rigid society in which our futures are determined by our class? It may sound cynical, but frankly it suits them. Labour Party politicians thrive on barriers against the poor. They need a narrative of injustice.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, which has also bought into the idea of meagre social mobility, wants to detoxify its image and show that it cares about the poor. To do so, it will show outrage at any possible hindrance to the less well off. In this sense, assertions about a socially immobile Britain are a convenient untruth. Most of the media go along with it because the alternative is too awful to contemplate: a moderately good news story.
There is one problem that has gone unmentioned in all this. Those on benefits tend not be included in these studies. It is surely true that those children who are brought up on benefits, living on council estates populated with drug gangs, attending schools which fail even to teach the children to become fully literate, do not have good prospects. This is because Britain does not have an overall mobility problem, but it does have an underclass problem, which is in part, a product of our welfare state which has been dysfunctional for a generation. It is possible that it is being addressed by recent welfare reforms which are helping and pushing more people into work. But it would be better for the Government to focus on the “made by government” issue of the underclass at the bottom than to worry about barriers to entry at the top.