A few reports being published this week have confirmed what this blog has long been arguing – that this Government has failed utterly to improve social mobility since it was elected in 1997. Indeed, social mobility has grown worse rather than better since 1997 and a child’s life chances, now more than ever, are overly linked to their parent’s incomes and their social status. The Government’s failure to improve the life chances of people from lower income backgrounds stands as one of its starkest failures. It has badly let down at lot of those people who invested most hope in it back in 1997.
The report published yesterday, by the ‘Social Justice Commission’ should come with the health warning of being a report commissioned by the Liberal Democrats. It does, however, contain a damning indictment of this Government’s failure, suggesting that after over a decade of Labour Government, we are “a society of persistent inequality.” Despite being elected with the promise of improving social mobility, New Labour has patently failed to help those who placed most faith in it. Privately educated people still dominate the professions – indeed they do so to a greater extent than they did eleven years ago. Such a situation cannot be regarded as acceptable in modern Britain.
As conservatives we are right to commit ourselves to doing so much more than this Government to smash the glass ceiling in British life. Rather than making token pronouncements, we are right to consider the root causes of the decline in social mobility. We need to tackle the poor performance of schools in many low income areas by, if necessary, creating new schools as competition and encouraging the brightest and the best teaching talent to teach there. We have to do all that we can to ensure that the education offered in the state sector is as good, if not better, than the education offered in the private sector. We also need to look at how welfare is holding people back and reform the welfare system to empower people in working class communities.
As progressive Conservatives we genuinely believe in creating opportunity for the many rather than the few. That may have also been part of Blair’s rhetoric in the mid ‘90s but we will accompany rhetoric with action. Only the public service reforms that we are proposing will make this rhetoric reality. Only boldness rather than New Labour timidity will allow all Britons, regardless of background, to flourish and remove the obstacles, which are holding them back. That boldness is being offered by our public service reforms, only timidity and token gestures are being offered by our rivals.
Related posts:
I am sure it will only a matter of time before you start advocating the levelling down of those whom you perceive to be too successful. No doubt Polly Toynbee would approve.
What part of ‘smash the glass ceiling in British life’ have you interpreted as wanting to level down (previous comment)?
So just how are you going to manage that given your determination to follow the left’s prescriptions and your hostility to the agenda of people like IDS who have at least tried to make out another way forward?
Politicalbetting has a good sentence this morning which is roughly that Brown fares worse in adversity than Cameron. I for one would much prefer to have someone (as Shakespeare has it) “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and by opposing end them.” Brown doesn’t. He hides away.
REgarding comments 1 and 3, if you had taken the time to read the article, you would see a number of ideas that the Conservatives are proposing to increase social mobility. Notable amongst these are a focus on education, particularly on the supply side with creation of new schools, and long overdue reform of the welfare system.
We are quite clear that all should be able to aspire and succeed in a genuinely meritocratic society. There is not a single element of levelling down about this approach.
Concerning Polly, do check out this piece I did about her a few weeks ago:
Who is going to disagree with the argument that all should be able to aspire and succeed in a genuinely meritocratic society? However, you cannot truly will the end without willing the means. As Nick Cohen points out in today’s Standard, only academic selection in schools has ever made any impact, however imperfect, on the glass ceiling. Yet you have aligned yourselves with the left in opposing the only measure that has ever made meritocracy even a partial reality in post-was Britain. Likewise you backed Blair over university tuition fees….once of the most regressive steps taken in the last ten years, which have left many saddled with unaffordable debt and degreees of little value.