Why am I being lectured about social mobility by people who were born at the top?
Nick Clegg's current internship is perhaps not going as well as his first one. He seems to be gaining valuable experience, but he needs a little bit more motivation, and to use his own initiative. Anyway, it's a start, isn't it? Deputy prime minister? Who knows, it may pave the way to a decent job one day.
Actually, the peculiar Prince of Punchbags that Clegg has become is painful to watch. He cries to music, he informs Jemima Khan in an interview for the New Statesman. He has feelings, you know. He has more to cry about than music. Everything he touches is now somehow tainted with that fatal compromise. When he talks about his own privilege and is simply trying to be honest, it backfires. He got jobs though his father's connections. That's how it all works. Oh really, who would have guessed? It's hardly a state secret that Westminster runs on interns working for nothing, but lately people have been worrying a lot about social mobility. Why? Perhaps because one of the successes of Thatcherism was to associate itself with "getting on".
It was undeniably a deep failure for Labour that things did not really feel that way again. All that time in government and we end up with less ability to move on up than ever before. This wasn't simply the "fault" of Labour, just like the crash wasn't their "fault". Some of this reduction in mobility is to do with complex global trends. Gordon Brown at one point seemed concerned. In his 2007 leadership speech, he said: "Wherever we find opportunity denied, aspirations unfulfilled, potential unrealised; wherever and whenever we find injustice and unfairness, there we must be also – and it is our duty to act." So did he? Or did he go missing?
Blairites hadn't talked so much about social mobility because they were all about the business of being filthily relaxed with the filthy rich. The subtext here was the trickle-down model of wealth. The evidence for that working is yet to actually trickle down. But suddenly, at a time of widening inequality, a lot of politicians are once more anxiously handwringing about social mobility.
I find it laughable. I also want to throw my TV out of the window every time some posh bloke – Clegg/Cameron/Miliband – earnestly explains what they are doing about raising us up into their stratosphere. Should we genuflect because they care? They pretend a vague embarrassment about their own backgrounds, but exude the very confidence that that these backgrounds gave them. They know best. So I find myself being lectured about social mobility by those who were born at the top and, er … amazingly, stayed at the top. So agile! "You think you're so clever and classless and free?" Well you know the rest of the words. Why not ask some peasants who have achieved mobility how we did so? Or ask what marks out a more socially mobile society?
We don't ask these questions because we don't want the answers. Indeed, I wonder if the desire for social mobility is even real. It is enough if a few people make it. It reassures everyone that it is possible to come from "a poor background" and get on in life. Exceptions prove the rules. And the rules are actually becoming more rigid.
Mobility, we are being told once again, may mean actual mobility. Get on your bikes and look for work. But even when those who can do, it all starts to look rather like the Tour de France, a few pull out front, there is some sort of middle mass, and many get left behind or just fall off.
The general consensus that education is all that matters needs breaking down. The relationship of education to family income is really the key. We also understand the huge importance of those "early years", but politicians are currently seeking a way of achieving mobility without spending money. The shutting of Sure Start centres and the huge losses of all kinds of children's services means that anything that may enhance life chances is considered, in reality, disposable.
The fuss now about internships is really about social capital. If one is born into a family that can buy you the right internship and afford for you to work for free, you are rich not just in terms of money, but in terms of cultural wealth, too. Income is related to outcome.
It is not in any way fair. The coalition's acknowledgment of this unfairness is nothing to do with redistributing chances and everything to do with their embrace of "nudge" theory: the idea that you can persuade or nudge people into behaving better, rather than using heavyhanded legislation. So we could "nudge" the corporate world into giving internships to those from poorer backgrounds. This would obviously be a good thing and it would also cost the government zilch.
While this may help individuals, it does nothing to change the structural faltering of social mobility that has happened over the last 20 years or so. While some people felt themselves to be more mobile in the 80s as they bought property, society in general has become more and more static. We have, in short, become more like America, where the chances of someone poor making it, despite the American dream, have grown smaller. That this period coincides with the huge rise of celebrity culture is surely no coincidence. The idea that an ordinary person can become extraordinary and famous, bypassing the normal social routes, is a necessary fiction.
In an article in Vanity Fair, of all places, Joseph Stiglitz puts it straight: "The upper 1% of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1% control 40%."
Quite simply, the super-rich have pulled so far away from the rest of us – here as they have in the US – they do not see the need to spend on "common need", because they can buy everything they need for themselves. The enormous rewards given to those in the financial sector created these oligarchs, and came precisely from making profit without risk. The risks were sold on. And we are paying the price.
Huge income disparity ensures a complete slowing down of social mobility. The rich don't see the price we all pay. Nor do they care about the returns made on the investments that the state makes in its citizens. The state that provided my education and housing for a period of five years enabled me then to work and pay taxes for the rest of my life. Without that support I would not have been able to work and support my children as I always have. Mobility for me came from access to education, housing and childcare. It was that simple. The super-rich, however, may bypass the state altogether and, as is now clear, exist beyond the reach of government. They are untouchable.
Social mobility is fine in theory, but in practice we live in a society where it is becoming more and more difficult for many to move at all. Nudging is not nearly enough. The reality of deepening inequality is horrible paralysis. The numbing of chance is never a fine thing.