The Spectator

Letters: The veiled elitism of social mobility

issue 01 May 2021

Levelling up

Sir: In making the case for social mobility, Lee Cain unwittingly endorses the classism he hopes to fight (‘Left behind’, 24 April). As the historian Christopher Lasch has argued, the canard of social mobility merely replaces ‘an aristocracy of wealth with an aristocracy of talent’. Far from being egalitarian, the concept is inherently elitist: it implies moving up, out or away from a class, town or profession condemned as undesirable. And by paying lip service to ‘meritocracy’ it becomes a self-serving justification for elites’ power and privilege — if they had the ‘ability and ambition’ to rise to the top, it must only be indolent dullards who are left behind.

For Lasch, the most important choice a democracy has to make is ‘whether to raise the general level of competence, or merely to promote a broader recruitment of elites’. In seeking to regenerate deprived areas, Johnson’s levelling-up agenda appears to aim at the former.

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