Nick Clegg's plan to make internships transparent is all very well, but for the government's real priorities, follow the money
It is easier to identify practices that block social mobility than policies that produce it. The sort of thing that does not help is the recent Conservative fundraising auction at which rich parents purchased internships for their children at top City firms. Less shaming but more typical are the three-month unpaid internships flagged on the Liberal Democrat website. As with voluntary experience on offer in barristers' chambers and other top workplaces, any graduate can apply, but graduates whose parents have large London homes and the means to support them will be more likely to do so.
Nick Clegg yesterday published a plan making the welcome if modest suggestion that Whitehall internships will be advertised properly, not dished out via family connections of the sort that he was immediately and churlishly taunted for having relied on in his youth. Beyond SW1, it is hoped that businesses will volunteer to untangle themselves from the old boy net. A few have made that promise, but there is no obligation on others to follow suit.
Internships can only be one tiny part of a response to the social sclerosis that politicians of all stripes routinely lament. Mr Clegg's document was similar in tone to several that Gordon Brown published. While the evidence on whether mobility is worsening is mixed, it is plainly too low, and that needs to be said. But what matters is how words translate to deeds. The cabinet's offer to go into schools and give pep talks to teens was deemed to merit a special box in the strategy paper, suggesting that real policies were in short supply. The Lib Dem funding premium for poor pupils has a valuable role, although in this climate it is more about alleviating the cuts than anything positive.
Steps up the class ladder take place over entire generations, so five-year governments know they cannot be judged by results. The Telegraph enthusiastically reported that the issue was as much middle-class kids as the deprived, and it seems mobility talk can mean all things to all men. The BBC's gently teasing brainbox Evan Davis asked minister David Willetts whether the plan amounted to the hope that all government policies would work well.
To see where the real priorities lie, follow the money. A decent settlement was this week offered on pensions, even though the elderly are as unlikely to climb the class ladder as they are likely to vote. Meanwhile, from today, working families will see tax credits snatched away faster as they earn, child benefit frozen and a huge cut in childcare support. The message of yesterday's separate strategy on child poverty was that there is more to life than cash. That's as may be, but for poor parents hoping their children might do rather better, every little helps.