Stagnant Britain

What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection.

Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and a father with friends in high places no longer buy you a double six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap in any career in which you might ever have to open your mouth in public. In the House of Lords, there are almost twice as many classless Blair appointees as there are remaining hereditary peers. Among the British-born multimillionaires in the upper reaches of the annual Sunday Times Rich List, self-made, first-generation fortunes outnumber old money by six to one, and many of those successes have been achieved from the humblest of beginnings.

Where I live in Yorkshire, for example, we salute brothers Eddie and Malcolm Healey, worth £1.5 billion, who started with a DIY business in Hull and ended up acquiring the Marquess of Normanby’s vast Warter estate. Wherever you look, it seems, there is evidence that those with talent or ambition or both are free to rise as high they aspire — and those without are free to plunge through the threadbare safety net of privilege.

Yet the academics who study these things properly, not by anecdotal observation but by population samples reduced to mathematical formulae, take a different view. And Labour policy-makers, for all Tony Blair’s pre-election talk about ‘breaking down the barriers that stop people fulfilling their talent’, know that the data does not lie: a combination of social, economic and educational factors has actually made Britain less meritocratic on their watch, not more so.