Rwandan student Tindyebwa Agaba graduated this week from Exeter University with a 2:1 in politics, six years after he first arrived in Britain. His father had died of Aids, his mother and sister were missing, and after fleeing genocide in his own country, he lived rough in London. His life was transformed by two things: his own ambition and the support of his adoptive parents, the actors Emma Thompson and Greg Wise. Mr Agaba’s story reveals much about social mobility in Britain: that a young person can succeed if they aspire to do so, regardless of their background. But their chances soar into the stratosphere if they have successful parents who enjoy wealth and social status. Mr Agaba noted that he was the only politics student of African origin, for example, at his university. His next aim is to become a lawyer, but according to the government report on social mobility published this week, the legal world is far more privileged than Exeter University.

The mobility study, chaired by former Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn and commissioned by the Prime Minister, says that the top professions in Britain, including medicine, the law and accountancy, are increasingly a closed shop to all but the offspring of the most affluent. The professions, says the report, are dominated by those who benefit from private education, study at Russell Group universities, and use parental contacts to secure unpaid internships which offer vital professional experience. There has undoubtedly been social mobility in Britain since the 1944 Education Act. The numbers of people decreed middle class by both themselves and market researchers have expanded. Mr Milburn’s report recognises this, but also points out that even children of middle-income families miss out on the very top jobs, unable to compete with privilege.

The Milburn report is to be welcomed for highlighting just how polarised British society has become. While it makes many recommendations to help enhancing the chances ...

Family life in Britain is undoubtedly in crisis, and the breakdown of relationships has reached epidemic proportions. More marriages end in divorce than ever before, and an increasing proportion of the population has dispensed with weddings altogether, preferring the less publicly binding status of informal cohabitation. British Churches, the Catholic Church included, will therefore be sympathetic to the call from ...

Gordon Brown has manifestly not done enough to explain why British troops are dying in the dust and heat of Afghanistan, fighting an enemy whose aim seems to be the replacement of one corrupt Afghan regime by another. True, the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda in the days when it first declared war-by-terrorism on Western civilisation and carried out the attacks in the United States on 9/11. It is equally true that the Taliban ...

Benedict XVI's new social encyclical will take an hon­oured place in the series of such documents dating back to Rerum Novarum in 1891. Caritas in Veritate will be instantly scanned for what it has to say about contemporary concerns, such as the credit crunch, global warming, mass migration and unemployment. But its real if less newsworthy significance is in its development of the tradition. Each social encyclical ...

More than 100 British people, assisted in many cases by friends and relatives, have gone to Switzerland to end their own lives. Although assisting in another's suicide is illegal, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided on compassionate grounds that criminal proceedings against the relatives would not be in the public interest. This reflects the wisdom that good law needs a stern face but a kind heart - justice ...

Karl Rahner, the Jesuit theologian, once said that he found it astonishing that people living in an era of TV talk shows should question the merits of confession. Twenty-five years after Rahner's death, confessional TV and magazine interviews are even more the norm, as are the greater use of the therapist's skills. Yet confession - the original way of unburdening one's soul - continues to decline in popularity ...