No industry, no jobs, no incentive – the idea that Nick Clegg's internships will change the towns I visited last week is laughable
If David Cameron and Nick Clegg are really worried about social mobility they would not have raised VAT. The greatest aid to social mobility is money. The greatest redistributor of money is growth. The greatest curb on growth is restricted demand. The coalition "social mobility strategy" reminded me of the entire Congolese army being promoted one rank to make it feel better. The strategy is one of those lurches after virtue that seize ministers from time to time, like being photographed going to church. Margaret Thatcher had Victorian values, John Major had back-to-basics and Tony Blair had crusader Catholicism. Social mobility is a bit of coalition candy.
It also means another national debate on Britain's favourite sociological topic, the class system. Tuesday's version concerned the spread of unpaid internships, a consequence of the minimum wage and surplus graduates with parents rich enough to support them into their 20s. The middle classes, or at least the upper-middle ones, have discovered that private schooling no longer guarantees work. It must be supplemented by a private income and a "private" job.
Internship has become a new class divide, replacing the old school tie with an upmarket apprenticeship in "daddy's firm". Short-handed management consultancies and political, media and arts organisations play host to self-assured young men and women, whom they need pay nothing. Internship is the first step on the ladder to a proper job. The hottest item in charity gala auctions is no longer a winter cruise or free facial but a fashionable internship. It can fetch a five-figure sum. Britain's establishment is renewing itself, like Wellington's army, through bought commissions. Mums fight for internships as they once fought for handbags in the Harrods sale.
This is a symptom of recession. Politicians can demand "job creation", but it is an economist's version of immaculate conception. No one can create a job, though someone can, and should, mitigate the unfair advantage of wealth and influence in allocating those jobs the economy still offers. Even so, it is no big deal. Clegg's obsession with internship recalls Victorian philanthropy funding apprenticeships for the "deserving" workhouse poor.
Social mobility is a derivative of the overall political economy. The OECD recently found that one indicator – the closeness of parents' income to that of their children – was "particularly pronounced in the United Kingdom, Italy and France". The income premium to having a well-educated parent was highest in conservative southern Europe and in the UK. Such international differences can only be the outcome of deep-rooted social structures. What is particularly strange is the gulf between the UK and the other Anglo-Saxon and Nordic states of northern Europe.
When Michael Young wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958 he was being not descriptive but satirical. He saw the new forces of educational selection in postwar Britain as yielding a new "restless elite", a creative minority rising above "the stolid majority". The agency of this classless elitism was to be the expanded universities. Young's satire fed widespread antagonism, on left and right, to the mechanistic 11-plus. Instead we had comprehensive education and soaring competition for university places among the "children of the meritocracy". The new elite then looked after their own. The new middle class was just as entrenched as the old one.
Real social immobility – as opposed to a few toffs – is rooted in Britain's economic geography, in a Victorian legacy of one-industry cities and towns such as Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield and the mining and milling areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire and south Wales. At the very time the industries in these places were collapsing, the welfare state was bringing their citizens a housing and income security that made it hard to move in search of work. The central government also starved their civic leaders of the autonomy to go out and fight for new business, as their contemporaries were doing in the Ruhr or US rustbelt.
New internships will have no impact on the Durham towns I visited last week, from which coal and steel have fled and where absolutely nothing is on offer in the jobcentres to school or college leavers. There is no incentive for any but the bravest to up sticks and find work where they can. That is why the former minister Alan Milburn could say on Tuesday, after 13 years of Labour government: "We still live in a country where, invariably, if you're born poor, you die poor, just as if you go to a low-achieving school, you tend to end up in a low-achieving job."
I find writers on cities such as Lynsey Hanley and Anna Minton give the best account of social immobility, in charting the working-class exclusivity and inflexible design of postwar council housing. As the economy moved southwards, millions were marooned on estates that no political correctness could deny were nightmarish. Hanley's estate outside Birmingham had built-in social immobility. One-class housing entrenched poor schools, dysfunctional families and cultural desertification.
As Hanley wrote of her escape: "I've done my time. I want some peace and quiet, and a pretty home." The only social mobility that worked was mobility. Hanley's one choice was to flee from one ghetto to another. It's security of housing tenure that impedes economic migration and ossifies divides. As long as rich unionists, such as the train drivers' Bob Crow, can occupy subsidised social housing in London, there will be no room for mobile newcomers.
The same ideological confusion surrounds the grammar school, often claimed as the engine of social mobility, usually by its few working-class beneficiaries. But it hardly eased division. As Young wrote: "Every selection of one is a rejection of many." We all have our pet theories on schooling, but my conviction is that the greatest impediment to social mobility is not the private school, which still caters only for a tiny minority, but the poverty of so many state schools left with nothing approaching a socially mixed catchment area. The key to mobility is again housing, to the goal of integrated mixed communities.
Class is nowadays basically a function of income. It can't respond to some quick-fix Cameron initiative or Clegg internship. Divisiveness will get worse because the political economy of Britain is structurally inept at generating and redistributing wealth across the human landscape. The only real aid to upward mobility is income and growth. That is why the last thing Cameron should have done was put up VAT.