In the wake of two more reports predicting growing inequality in Britain, it is worth looking back to the start of the month and the abrupt resignation of Alan Milburn from the Social Mobility Commission, along with all its commissioners. “The growing sense that we have become an ‘us and them’ society is deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation,” wrote Mr Milburn in his resignation letter.
This was a moment that confirmed two things about Theresa May’s government. First, there is no energy in Whitehall for anything except getting out of the EU. The commission had been left to stew, its recommendations ignored, departing members not replaced, its resources inadequate. Second, Mrs May’s words about helping the so-called left-behind may have been meant in earnest but it will be no more of a priority for her than it was for her predecessors. No wonder the commission’s reports had grown ever more blunt about the failure to improve the chances of the least well off.
Social mobility, a phrase meant to capture the ease with which children can do better than their parents, was made common currency by Gordon Brown. In 2009 he asked Mr Milburn, a Blair-era cabinet minister who has become an expert in the interlocking policies that shape life chances, to look at how to improve them. Three years later Mr Milburn was asked by the coalition to head the new Social Mobility Commission.
In June this year he published a report that reviewed the past 20 years of social policy, and explicitly called for a change of direction. A government serious about fairness would have listened. Instead, with the distinguished exception of the education secretary, Justine Greening, inertia ruled. In November the commission published its fifth and final State of the Nation report, and then resigned en masse.
It is easy to see why Mrs May lost interest in the commission as a vehicle for helping the least advantaged. She interprets her mandate as delivering on Brexit and increasing the number of grammar schools. The commission, cross-party in its membership, notably unpolitical in its prescriptions, recommends 10-year time horizons and policymaking that is coherently designed and consistently applied. That means recognising – for example – that early years interventions are an important extension of the welfare state intended to eliminate the irrecoverable gap between poor and better-off children when they start school – and not primarily a way of making sure mothers can work. It means ending the constant structural reforms to education and allowing change to bed down; and recognising that while access to university is important, so are the prospects for the large proportion of the low-paid workforce who, rather than move up the pay scale, move out of work entirely. It means ending over-generous pensioner benefits, tougher tax rules on housing wealth, and an end to huge disparities in regional and sometimes intra-regional spending.
Following the Brexit referendum, few would argue with the commission’s depiction of a country divided by age, geography, income and wealth. After 1997, the disadvantages of being born into poorer families started to be eroded by higher spending and a growing economy. Now that is stalled – not only because of the shrinking state, nor the inevitable impact of globalisation, but because it is not the measure of success by which Conservative governments want to be judged. That much was clear when the coalition set up the commission in the name of “improving life chances”, and at the same time abandoned Mr Brown’s targets for reducing child poverty. Meanwhile, economists developed the idea of the Great Gatsby curve, showing that the greater a country’s wealth equality, the higher the social mobility.
An important academic debate about the impact of framing – between a focus on social mobility and a focus on promoting equality – is now beginning to shape public policy choices. Some Tories believe that social mobility is the same as meritocracy; it is not. Realising talent takes more than a level playing field, and meritocracy can all too easily turn into a justification for an elite’s defence of its privilege.
It was the great Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart who first pointed out the law of the ridiculous reverse: no politician would declare they intended to govern for the few. But that can still be the impact of their policy choices. Mr Milburn’s moribund Social Mobility Commission has mapped out how to make a reality of governing for the country as a whole. It is time for a change.
