Blimpish || a Tory

Alan Milburn writes in The Times:

“Like many in my generation, I have had that chance in my life. I was lucky. I grew up on a council estate and ended up in the cabinet. I benefited from a good family, a strong community and a society that was moving from 1950s rigidness to 1960s openness. Social mobility was in full swing. The reforms of the postwar years – universal education and the welfare state – provided unheard-of opportunities for working-class kids to get on. And as professional and service-based jobs grew, so more room was created at the top of British society.

“In the decades since then, birth, not worth, has become more and more a determinant of people’s life chances. But the latest evidence suggests that the long-running decline in social mobility has bottomed out. This is the right time for the government to make its core purpose creating an upwardly mobile society again.”

Swingin’ social mobility, eh?  Hmph.  Milburn massively overplays the decline in mobility (see David Goodhart’s article here).  The implicit argument is that, in a history of immobility, there was a brief flowering in the 1960s, and then it all collapsed again…  Until the Blairites made it all better, that is.  Probably not, in fact.  There was a huge explosion in mobility in the immediate postwar era because Britain had previously been highly immobile; this then receded a bit (more for men than women, as women were catching up).  Social change rarely starts and stops neatly.

Given that at least some degree of (cognitive and non-cognitive) ability is heritable (through genes and environment), mobility was likely to decline after its initial growth – because the distribution of ability across social class was going to change too.  Dynamics matter.  Also, universal education continued to expand, albeit more slowly, after the 1960s, while the welfare state also expanded well in the 1960s and 1970s (in the 1980s too, but that was to cope with high numbers).  But leave the diagnosis aside, here comes the prescription…

“And we know, from evidence across the globe, what makes for a more upwardly mobile society. An economic policy that prioritises high skills and quality jobs. A welfare system that encourages work, not dependence. Early-years education that is comprehensive and high quality. Schools that have rising standards. Learning that is for life. Families that are supported. Communities that are empowered. Individuals that own assets and feel they have a real stake in society.”

Some of these are trivially true – nobody’s going to want schools with falling standards or an economic policy which prioritises crap jobs, I imagine.  The questions that matter are what those goals look like in practice, and how we can realise them; and they’re bloody difficult questions with no easy answers.  But some of them raise some interesting contrasts with his own story.  Milburn (correctly) places a lot of value on coming from “a good family, a strong community”; but were those families especially supported, were those communities empowered, in the terms we mean?

No, 1950s working-class families and their communities prided themselves on their independence, almost to the point of proud insularity.  And to be fair, one aspect of the decline in mobility may well be that Milburn’s generation benefited from such an environment, but the social change which coincided with increased mobility (the move from “from 1950s rigidness to 1960s openness”) probably undermined it.  This isn’t a nostalgic point; my point is only that progress has costs as well as benefits; for all that we’ve become a more open society, where individual talents can prosper, we’ve also lost, in some parts, some of the social capital which better developed those individual talents.

As part of his mobility schtick, Milburn says:

“That is why the prime minister has asked me to chair a panel looking at what more needs to be done so that the best people, regardless of their backgrounds, have a fair crack of the whip when it comes to securing a professional career. With 90% fewer unskilled jobs and 50% more professional jobs expected in Britain by 2020, our future success depends on unlocking the talents of all our people.”

This last bit is true New Labour; the pleasant always coincides with the effective, and so it’s not only just to raise mobility, but necessary for economic growth – we actually need a more mobile society to prepare for the ‘global economy’, the Chinese, whatever.  The numbers about changing workforce needs taken from the Leitch Review, which proclaims (seemingly without irony, as Alison Wolf pointed out) “History tells us that no one can predict with any accuracy future occupational needs.  The Review is clear that skills demands will increase at every level.”  The Review is worth a post or two in its own right, it is so shot through with blind assertions, easily disproved assumptions, and cherry-picking of evidence, and as the numbers imply, the seeming view that businesses will leave masses of workers unemployed because they haven’t got the right piece of paper.  But another time.