‘No party sees votes in promising that our grandchildren will be better off than we are’

According to Sir John Major, it is “truly shocking” that “the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class” – widely interpreted as a dig at Old Etonian David Cameron and the so-called “upper-class toffs” with whom he has surrounded himself. In a wide ranging speech, the former Prime Minister and grammar-school boy slammed every Labour Government since Ramsay MacDonald for everything wrong with British society.

“Despite Labour’s absurd mantra to be the one-nation party,” he declared, “they left a Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration. New Labour promised social improvement but delivered a collapse in social mobility” – at the top of the Conservative party, presumably. The best one can make of it is that this strangely named “Victorian divide” is down to the abolition of grammar schools, though it was arch-Tory Margaret Thatcher who was mostly responsible for that. Hence, Sir John seems to be implying, the nation has had no choice but to turn to private schools to educate its elites. As if it didn’t always.

Britain is, along with the United States, the least socially mobile country in the developed world. This is surely connected to the fact that these two countries are also the most unequal in terms of wealth distribution; and to them being the two closest to a free-market ideal in their business and economic systems. These trends are Labour’s fault only because the last Labour Government did not manage to reverse them; but then neither did John Major when he had the chance.

Social mobility is a complex phenomenon, and any attempt to address it by government policy runs into the problem of time-scale. Mobility largely happens generation by generation; the political cycle turns every four or five years. No party sees votes in promising that our grandchildren will be better off than we are. What we get promised instead is equal opportunity. But considering that the key formative years of a child’s brain development come before it even starts school, and depend on such factors as how many times a day the child is spoken to in coherent English, that is a misleading aspiration. What is equal between a three-year-old child of an ill-educated single parent of below- average intelligence, and a similar child of two happily married university graduates? “Equal opportunity” simply becomes a phoney moral basis to justify unequal outcomes.

The upsurge in social mobility in Britain, which happened to coincide with the existence of grammar schools, was caused by basic changes in the economic and social structure after the Second World War which produced a rapid increase in middle- class employment opportunities. So the middle class expanded. But it was a one-off. It soon hit a ceiling.

Unless a class higher up the social hierarchy grows in size as lower classes shrink, as happened after the war, social mobility can only mean that if some move up, others must move down. That is not a message it is easy to sell to the middle classes. And if the motor of this movement is meritocracy, where those who move up are those who “deserve” to, equilibrium will eventually set in when all the deserving ones have got what’s coming to them.

And – here’s the rub – that will also be when the undeserving ones have got what’s coming to them too. And so a pool of social and educational inadequacy collects at the bottom of the heap, marked above all by deprivation. Those least deserving, under this value-system, receive least. Meritocracy and equal opportunity, in other words, is a very dangerous game. Often confused with fairness or even social justice, it can lead to the very opposite.

Despite John Major’s blind spots, the truth in what he is saying is that it is intolerable that anybody should be relegated to the rubbish heap. But Governments have far fewer levers to alter these outcomes than they like to admit. The real engine of inequality is undoubtedly the grossly inflated financial sector, on which, under both Tory and Labour Governments, the economy has become too reliant. It has become an engine for concentrating wealth on those who already have it. A long-term shift back to real wealth- creating industry, in other words towards the German model, would reverse the growing inequality in British society and inspire politicians and those who elect them with a worthwhile political programme. Then we could let social mobility take care of itself.