Opinion & Commentary
Leftist class chatter no longer matters in UK
I was recently invited to be on a panel at a conference in London, debating the relevance of social class in contemporary Britain. The topic was prompted by the fact Britain has just elected its first Old Etonian Prime Minister since 1964. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was also at Eton, and the Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, attended Westminster, another exclusive public school. Does all this mean the traditional ruling class is staging a comeback?
British commentators love discussing this sort of thing, for they are obsessed by class divisions. When television producers are not busy filming Edwardian upstairs-downstairs dramas, movie-makers are working on tales of plucky steelworkers being made redundant by Margaret Thatcher, colliery brass bands stoically playing on after their pit has closed, or miners' sons trying out as ballet dancers as their fathers go on strike. As economist Peter Bauer put it in a pamphlet 30 years ago, British intellectuals have "class on the brain".
So, nowadays, do British politicians. In the last three years of the Labour government, three official reports were commissioned on class inequality. They all concluded that Britain is an unfair society where lower-class children are blocked from realising their potential. Former cabinet minister Alan Milburn claimed in one of these reports: "Birth, not worth, has become more and more a determinant of people's life chances," and he concluded that Britain was "a closed shop society". Not to be outdone, the Tories (then in opposition) produced a report of their own, which proclaimed: "Social mobility has ground to a halt."
Similar claims were made by my fellow panellists at the conference. One was a journalist from the left-wing tabloid, The Daily Mirror. He told the audience: "Your parents' occupation will almost determine your occupation." Another was a sociologist at a further education college. He asserted: "Upward social mobility in Britain is a total myth."
I recently published a review of what the evidence on social mobility actually tells us. I found that movement in Britain is extensive, both up and down.
If we divide the population into a professional-managerial class at the top, a manual working class at the bottom, and an intermediate class in between, more than half the population is in a different social class from the one it was born into. One third of professional-managerial people come from manual worker backgrounds, and one in seven sons born to professional-managerial fathers end up as manual workers.
Even though Brits believe other countries are much more open than theirs, this degree of social mobility is similar to that found in other advanced, market-based societies. One study ranks Britain eighth of 15 countries; a bit more open than Germany, France and the Netherlands, a bit less than Sweden, the US and Australia. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development similarly puts Britain in the middle of its rankings of downward mobility (the best test of openness is downward mobility, for this tells you how far successful parents can pass on their privileges to their children).
Recruitment into social classes in Britain takes place largely on meritocratic principles, which is hardly surprising given that sensible employers will select bright and hard-working applicants ahead of posh ones. Your class origins do still have some influence on where you end up (given the importance of early years parenting, it would be extraordinary if they didn't), but raw ability and gutsy hard work count for much more. Your score on an IQ test at age 11 is three times more powerful than your parents' social class in predicting the occupational class you will achieve as an adult (and that is after controlling for any "class bias" in the IQ test).
Why, given this evidence, do intellectuals continue to claim Britain is an unfair, class-ridden country? And does this chatter matter?
The resilience of the myth may have something to do with the survival of the monarchy and aristocracy at the top of British society. This upper-class froth gives credence to left-wing claims that birth matters more than worth, even though this doesn't apply to the other 99 per cent of Britons.
This is why the doomsayers have seized on David Cameron's alma mater, for having an Old Etonian PM fits the stereotype of Britain they want to peddle.
These misleading claims matter, because they send out such a negative and counterproductive message to working-class children. The evidence tells us that, if you are bright and you work hard, there is nothing to stop you from succeeding in Britain, no matter where you start. But working-class kids are repeatedly being told by politicians, journalists and Marxist further education lecturers that it's all hopeless and their future is pre-determined.
Nothing is more likely to prevent lower-class children from succeeding than being told by opinion-formers that there is no point in them even trying.
Peter Saunders is senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Social Mobility Myths, published in London by Civitas.
