The news this week that New Labour consigliere Alan Milburn has received his Fabergé egg in the post and joined the coalition as social mobility tsar brought the usual howls of “scab!” from the naysaying left. Is he selling out his principles, has he discovered some new ones, or was he not quite at the front of the queue when they were handing out principles in the first place?
That our new government is run by young, rich noblemen, with the grammar school establishment shuffling off into the sunset with their inflation-proof pensions, shows how urgent the question of social mobility is today. To become an MP is now merely to achieve the next rank on the ladder of a political career: where once it was possible to be a success in industry, trade unions, the arts or law before entering parliament, to get there now requires a lengthy internship as press officer, party researcher and tank thinker. Before that, you need a lengthy spell of un- or pisspoorly paid work experience, which means having wealthy parents. Before even that, you need to have a good degree, which means having been to a good university, which means having been to a good school. In other words, the chances of getting from a council estate to the top of society – as many of our last generation of politicians, academics, media and legal folk did – are now basically zero. (As an aside, there’s a great irony that with the growing professionalisation and youth of the Commons, the House of Lords is now much more diverse, representative and unpredictable than the other place: a good reason to pause for thought before replacing it with another body identical to the Commons.)
This is a bad state of affairs, but I can’t believe it’s made better by opinions such as this recent article in the London Review of Books, attacking the idea of aspiration as an affront to equality. Rather, if you’d care to read the article first then return for a cheeky Fisk, I will argue the reverse.
Not having particularly fond memories of New Labour’s time in office, I was surprised to find myself with more praise for Alan Milburn at the end of the article than at the beginning: the intention of the piece, of course, being to bury him. The author – professor of intellectual history at Cambridge, and who could accuse someone with those credentials of elitism? – sees social mobility as a zero-sum game (as the economists put it). Maybe it’s true that there are only so many jobs as high court judge or head of the BBC to go round: but for every one like that there are thousands that are created by society becoming more prosperous generally. So in this case it’s not necessarily true that “if there are winners there must be losers“: but even if it were, you’d think a supposed man of the left would want to swap at least some of the winners and the losers round (perhaps until you remember he’s very much one of the winners).
As we’ve all learned the hard way, life’s unfair: but it’s a reactionary response to scoff at the idea of helping those at the bottom try to get nearer the top. In Stefan Collini’s anger at the status quo, all he can hope for is to get rid of all differences between bottom and top: in other words, a total fantasy whose logical conclusion we have also learned the hard way (clue: it’s not Scandinavian social democracy). Being ruled by Milburn is annoying, but not as annoying as being ruled by Mao.
Note that Collini doesn’t mention absolute poverty once: he would apparently be just as annoyed if everyone in the world had enough to eat and a roof over their heads, so long as some people still had more money than others. The poor of Africa and Asia need the rule of law, property rights, democracy and access to markets – all of which can make relative poverty appear worse, but unquestionably work wonders against absolute poverty – more than they need another Marxist Mugabe.
For instance, “A common criticism of the ‘scholarship boy’ model of individual mobility was that it left the relative position of the social classes unchanged, even reinforcing existing hierarchies by siphoning off some of the outstanding talent in the lower classes into the higher classes.” Opposing this model (eg by scrapping the assisted places scheme, which was one of Labour’s first moves in ’97) isn’t going to obliterate class differences: it just perpetuates the status quo by making it easier for those who don’t care about those differences to do nothing about them (and easier for Etonians not to have to mix with oiks). Let’s be quite clear: the alternative to helping outstanding talent in the lower classes reach the top is not a workers’ paradise; it’s the higher classes staying higher, and the rest staying lower.
He goes on: “In 1951, one in every eight jobs was classified as ‘professional’; by 2001, more than one in three jobs were so classified, but the relative position of the groups filling the various levels of job may not have changed very much.” So it wouldn’t bother him if poor people’s children still went down the mines, as long as rich people’s children did too. Unlike him I think that statistic is a wonderful achievement, and his half-arsed conclusion is barely relevant. It also disproves his idea that there are only a fixed number of professional jobs to go around, so he’s contradicting himself. “What those others were pointing out was a matter of logic: where positional goods are concerned, no one can go up without others going down.“ This is a very disingenuous and misleading way of describing economic growth.
“What the Hills report carefully and unanswerably documents – and what the Milburn report over and over again inadvertently reveals – is that class (in the sense of objective economic position) is a much more powerful determinant of life chances than any other variable, including gender and ethnicity.” Indeed, but the left has chosen to ignore this over the last couple of decades, so no wonder the skilled working classes and lower middle classes have turned away from them. Likewise, with “In repositioning itself ideologically New Labour helped ensure that the ideological terrain of British public opinion acquired a more conservative character” he implies that this is the result of public opinion being dragged to the right by Labour. I would argue he has it the wrong way round: that the shift in opinion is actually a backlash against the last government and the things (and people) they prioritised. New Labour might have been rightwing about some things (like leaving the City to it) but you couldn’t possibly describe them as conservative.
Still, I’m glad we don’t have such an unrealisticly rosy view of social mobility as the Americans (whereby Joe the Plumber-types vote for tax cuts for billionaires in the not very clever assumption they’ll be rich too one day). The 50p top rate of tax and the tax on bankers’ bonuses are probably worth keeping for now, if only because of Orwell’s line that “The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes.” Like ‘too big to fail’, the suggestion that ‘soaking’ the rich in London would make them all move to Geneva overnight was a bit of City propaganda that a lot of people seem to have fallen for.
What Collini’s piece boils down to is an argument from the very top against those in the middle and near the bottom, who not unreasonably want something a bit more demanding out of their children’s education than a pass rate of 97.6%. Levelling down helps no-one, least of all the poor. The greatest period of social mobility – and the most egalitarian moment ever in British history – was when the postwar Labour government empowered individual working class people to better themselves through grammar schools and free university education. Millions took advantage of this and are now middle class. Without those institutions – which left and right have subsequently dismantled – the impoverished boomers who went on to ru(i)n the country could not have hoped for any more out of life than their fathers got. Many of those who made excuses for New Labour’s failures on social mobility say the maturation of the boomers coincided with a huge expansion of public services, academia and other knowledge industries, offering new jobs for the new middle classes to fill, and that this trick can’t be repeated. I concede that point: but who could honestly argue that the average comprehensive offers any route off a sink estate for underclass kids now? Even the Tories now oppose academic selection on the grounds that it’ll create “two-tier education”: isn’t the situation we have today, where a good education is assured by money but not by ability, just that?
Yet those postwar reforms were a massive victim of their own massive success, shifting society from being overwhelmingly working class to being predominantly middle class. The electorate got what they wanted out of Attlee’s government and its successors to such an extent that they no longer felt that Old Labour served their interests. The left, then, reinvented itself, emphasising gender, minorities, sexual revolution and suchlike. The more it did so, the more it divorced itself from its socially (if not economically) conservative roots, and the less the humble, aspirational classes shaped the political mainstream, squeezed by the isolationist rich from one side and the new cultural left from the other.
Finally, “the Victorian argument about the deleterious effect of doles on the ‘character’ of the poor had a parallel in the case of the children of the rich“: and is it any coincidence that the 19th century was the first time in British history that millions of people escaped poverty? And, “The fallacy of individualism is that what may appear to be rational for an individual acting in isolation is often not what would be rational for a society acting in concert.” For the counterpoint to this piece of crypto-communism I recommend this immortal line from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Smith’s view of it is increasingly challenged by environmental externalities, but is not undone by the actions of a few bankers. The sort of selfish, nepotistic aspiration Collini rails against is about as fundamental a component of human nature as you can get, is impossible to legislate away, and has given us the leisure to sit around debating these points (and as Tim Worstall puts it, the only political unit in which “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has worked is the family). Policymakers should regulate and harness greed for the public good, rather than letting it run riot (Russia, 1991-present) or somehow coercing it out of existence with epic portions of violence (Russia, 1917-1991).
We’ll have to wait and see whether Milburn has learned any of the lessons of his failure in government; and, if so, whether the new one is prepared to learn from them. But he could make a good start by ignoring ladder draggers like Collini.
[...] seen yet of the contemporary left’s preference for equality over meritocracy, which I have argued delivers [...]