For a Labour government, improving social mobility must start with reducing inequality, writes James Bloodworth

Social mobility is in reverse in Britain and a large number of the best jobs are increasingly snapped up by those from privileged backgrounds. Things have got so bad that even the former Conservative prime minister John Major, hardly a tribune of the working class, recently talked of the ‘collapse of social mobility’ and proclaimed himself shocked that, ‘In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class.’

The dominance of the affluent is most glaringly apparent in professions like politics, journalism and law. Just seven per cent of Britons are privately educated, yet, according to a government report published in August 2014, 33 per cent of members of parliament, 71 per cent of senior judges and 44 per cent of people on the Sunday Times Rich List went to fee-paying schools. Forty-three per cent of newspaper columnists and 26 per cent of BBC executives hail from the private school system.

The creative industries are increasingly dominated by the affluent too. In 2011, music magazine The Word found that the majority of chart acts in the United Kingdom were either privately educated or from exclusive stage schools. This compared with 1990, when it found that nearly 80 per cent of artists in the Top 40 were educated in state schools. Acting is faring no better. As the actor Julie Walters recently explained, ‘I look at almost all the up-and-coming names and they’re from the posh schools … Don’t get me wrong … they’re wonderful. It’s just a shame those working-class kids aren’t coming through. When I started, 30 years ago, it was the complete opposite.’

Austerity is undoubtedly making it harder to break the cycle of entrenched inequality of opportunity. As social mobility tsar Alan Milburn puts it, disadvantage and advantage now appear to be ‘cascading down the generations’.

New Labour must share at least some of the blame for this state of affairs. The last Labour government had an enviable record on poverty reduction, but to some extent took its eye off the ball on social mobility.

Both absolute and relative income poverty fell significantly among children and pensioners under New Labour. This was not simply the fruit of a booming economy; it was the result of conscious spending decisions taken by successive Labour governments. Tony Blair promised to end child poverty within a generation and Gordon Brown pledged ‘to end pensioner poverty in our country’. These goals were reflected in where government money went. Between 1997-98 and 2010-11, there was an £18bn annual increase in spending on benefits for families with children and an £11bn annual increase on benefits for pensioners by 2010-11. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out of the New Labour record, ‘… child and pensioner poverty would either have stayed the same or risen … had there not been these big spending increases’.

And yet New Labour represented something of a shift in emphasis on the left from equality of outcome to equality of opportunity. As Tony Blair himself put it during his time as prime minister, ‘My concern is not to penalise the people who are successful and doing well and earning a lot of money, my concern is to lift up the incomes of those who are at the lower end of the income scale.’

This was both admirable and a sensible-sounding position. After all, does it really matter how much the very rich take home? Surely what is important is that a rising tide lifts all boats, even if some do rise faster than others?

To some extent this is true: who does not believe that hard work should be rewarded? Yet there is mounting evidence that vast economic inequality damages social mobility. Of developed countries, the most egalitarian social democracies also happen to be the most meritocratic. Norway has the greatest level of social mobility followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Britain and the United States are the most unequal western societies in terms of income distribution and, unsurprisingly, have some of the worst rates of social mobility.

Put another way, it is increasingly clear that equality of opportunity is subverted by inequality of outcome; the privileges of the parents tend to become the privileges of the children.

This is why Ed Miliband is right to view inequality as one of the defining issues of our time. As he put it in his Hugo Young Lecture last year, ‘tackling inequality is the new centre-ground of politics’. When Miliband won the Labour leadership back in 2010, he did so on the claim that, during the financial crisis, Britain’s political compass had shifted decisively to the left. In terms of wealth inequality he was right – inequality is now as much a middle-class problem as it is a working-class one. The middle classes want to know that their children will be able to get on in life. Inequality is a barrier to that.

Despite it being increasingly fashionable on the left to lazily posit that Labour and the Conservatives are ‘the same’, the last Labour government had an array of achievements to its name. As well as poverty reduction, workers’ rights improved significantly under Labour and, shortly before the 2010 election, the Equality Act enshrined in law a public sector commitment to reducing the gap between the rich and poor.

Meanwhile, New Labour also ensured that the left triumphed in the culture ‘war’. When Labour came to office in 1997 the homophobic Section 28 was still on the statute book, preventing local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’. By the time Labour left office in 2010, Brown’s government was strengthening civil partnerships and had paved the way for David Cameron’s equal marriage bill.

But Labour modernisers must recognise that eyes were taken off the ball in terms of inequality. Government statistics show that, between 1997 and 2010, the real-terms gap in incomes between the highest and lowest earners grew by £237 per week. According to figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, the incomes of the poorest 10 per cent of UK households grew by £24 per week in real terms over Labour’s 13 years in power, compared with £897 to £1,153 per week (an increase of £256) for the richest 10 per cent. In the four years to 2011, the wages of each of the UK’s 100 top-paid FTSE chief executives increased by the amount that 10 average people are paid in a year. The Gini coefficient – used to measure income inequality in Britain – was rated as 26 in 1979. Today it has risen to 34.

There is little point in romanticising postwar Britain as some kind of paradise of social mobility. But nor is it wise to downplay the extent to which the so-called ‘one per cent’ have pulled away from the rest in recent years – and under successive Conservative and Labour governments. The challenges facing Labour and the left today are very different to those that existed in 1945, but in government Labour must rekindle at least some of the postwar spirit of challenging large inequalities of wealth. Not only for its own sake or based on a misguided ‘politics of envy’, but because any serious attempt at improving social mobility starts with a recognition that the astonishing rewards conferred on the one per cent too often allow them to tilt the system in their favour. The next Labour government should make improving social mobility an absolute priority. As a start, it must work towards a more equal society.

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James Bloodworth is editor of Left Foot Forward and a contributing editor to Progress

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