Britain’s elite is formed on the playing fields of independent schools and finished in the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge: a statement of the blinding obvious and the subject of the latest report from Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
The authors need not have bothered framing the title of the report as a question – Elitist Britain? Its evidence base is rich and depressingly familiar. Just seven per cent of the population attends independent schools, but the privately educated account for 71 per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of permanent secretaries, 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, 36 per cent of the cabinet (and 100 per cent of the Department for Education’s ministerial team) and 22 per cent of the shadow cabinet. There is a heavy bias towards London and the south-east. In short, those who don Oxbridge scarves and old school ties pull every lever of power in modern Britain.
Since the commission was formed, Milburn and his team have laid bare, in a series of excellent studies, the stark inequalities in modern Britain and the extent to which opportunity is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy and well connected. His latest report is as robust and well argued as every other. It begs the question: how many more reports do we need before there is a concerted effort by those in power to seriously address the problem?
The report makes a series of simple, practical steps that can be taken by government, employers, educators and families. Inexplicably, modest measures – like taking into account the wider social context of pupils’ academic achievements during university admissions – still generates heated political debate. For all the platitudes offered by the prime minister and his deputy, progress to end child poverty has ground to a shuddering halt against a backdrop of falling living standards and an economic recovery benefitting just a few at the top.
You don’t need to be as leftwing as Owen Jones or as rightwing as Douglas Carswell to appreciate that British politics and the wider establishment is experiencing a deep crisis of public confidence. Milburn’s report reveals overwhelming levels of public support for equality of opportunity. It is not hard to see why public trust in virtually every major institution is so low when virtually every major institution fails to look like the public.
The Labour party is fielding a diverse range of candidates at the next general election. Though more action is needed to make sure that our top team reflects the diversity of modern Britain many candidates, myself included, are products of having the ladder of opportunity extended to us and the ability to grasp and ascend it. Those who wield power do not surrender it with ease. The next Labour government needs to live up to the words on the back of our membership card and make the redistribution of opportunity a defining cause for a generation.
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Wes Streeting is parliamentary candidate for Ilford North and a former chief executive of the Helena Kennedy Foundation, a social mobility charity. He is one of the few recipients of free school meals to make it to Cambridge University and is a beneficiary of the Sutton Trust