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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is author of ‘The End of Aspiration?’
It has been traditional for every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher to make extravagant pledges to improve the UK’s social mobility. Even understated premiers, like Gordon Brown and Theresa May, made boosterish promises of an “age of aspiration”, heralding “the world’s great meritocracy”.
At least, it had been the tradition: Boris Johnson’s premiership saw the focus shift from individual opportunity to “levelling up” communities. And social mobility exited the lexicon altogether under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
The meritocratic rhetoric of 1979-2019 was always at odds with reality. Even five years ago, the chances of economic mobility (moving up — or down — the incomes ladder compared with parents at the same age) were worse than in other developed countries and had declined for post-boomer generations. The number of people with working-class parents in middle-class jobs, common in postwar decades, was lower than the number of middle-class kids going down in the world.
So talking up the ambitions didn’t deliver, but neither has dropping social mobility from the agenda been accompanied by the emergence of — to use Tony Blair’s phrase — “an opportunity society”.
My research five years ago tracked people from humble beginnings with careers as CEOs, surgeons, politicians, actors, and one billionaire entrepreneur. Their stories revealed recurring factors which enabled their rise. The last five years, though, reduced them all.
I was alerted to the first when two of my interviewees used the phrase “I had a posh friend”. Such peers normalise aspirations that might otherwise feel unattainable — and are guides to the arcane protocols of elite careers. But housing costs have steadily segregated neighbourhoods by income — and, via catchment areas, schools as well. This, and the government’s decision to allow faith schools to select their entire intake by faith, makes cross-class friendships less likely.
The second element is security. These families’ incomes were low but stable; none grew up in private rentals. Making plans for the future is harder when the present is precarious. Again, the situation has worsened in five years: as the Institute for Social and Economic Research found, “the “squeezed middle” is now the “precarious middle” . . . struggling to save . . . more likely than before to be in insecure jobs and insecure homes”. The new Renters (Reform) bill promised greater security for children born in private-renting households — now the majority. But, says Shelter, it has been watered down so much the organisation can no longer support it.
An elite career is also more likely if the road to opportunity does not have tolls — the living expenses incurred while amassing a portfolio of unpaid work to demonstrate talent for a paid role in the media or the arts, for example. But the tolls have risen. Real-terms cuts to maintenance loans mean an English student with the maximum loan must work 19 hours at minimum wage to cover their living costs, reducing the chance of extracurricular experience.
The biggest enabler of upward social mobility, though, is “room at the top”. The mass upward mobility of the 1950s and ‘60s was the result of new white-collar and skilled jobs. There has been a growth in high-paying occupations in the past few years, but IFS analysis shows this is largely a London phenomenon. To people like one graduate I met — who turned down a job in the capital because they couldn’t afford the advance rent and deposit — these opportunities are closed to upwardly mobile provincials.
The policy tools to reanimate social mobility do exist, as the avoidable drags on opportunity of the past five years demonstrate in reverse. There is also voter appetite: we want to climb out of the gutter in the short term, but we also want our children to reach for the stars. The next five must see it rise back up the agenda.
