Social mobility starts with accepting there’s no such thing as geniuses and imbeciles

Here’s a snapshot of modern Britain for you. Additionally, it may also be a textbook definition of irony.

This weekend we will indulge in a bout of flag-waving and simpering in honour of an elderly lady of modest ability (and immodest means) who nevertheless holds an office that she was never elected to – nor can she be removed by any democratic process – and whose status for her and her family is secure in perpetuity.

Meanwhile our elected politicians fall over themselves to decry how uneven our society has become, with old money, old schools and old professions dominated by a self-perpetuating elite.

Am I alone in finding this juxtaposition utterly, soul-bleachingly maddening?

Are we really about to celebrate six decades of pampered privilege for a woman, apparently chosen by God to be our Sovereign, while a fifth of British mothers regularly misses a daily meal to feed their kids?

Frankly, the God I believe in has better things to do than confer hereditary titles on sub-par individuals from the House of Windsor. Never mind Michael Gove distributing the King James Bible to every school – he should dispatch Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. A hereditary monarch remains as risible a concept as a hereditary surgeon.

But the canard is seductive. After reading Jan Royall’s sycophantic paean to Elizabeth Windsor the other day it seems even our people’s party is no longer immune to outbursts of cap-doffing our betters.

Fortunately there are still those who persist in worrying about our social condition. Indeed, there have been three significant interventions about how we improve social mobility in the past week.

First off, Ed Miliband made a thoughtful speech to the Sutton Trust – the charity campaigning to improve social mobility. He pointed out, not unreasonably, that the last Labour government had made significant strides in trying to narrow the opportunity gap, with initiatives like SureStart helping to improve life chances. However he also warned that the country was now “sliding backwards,” making it harder to climb the ladder “when the rungs are further apart”.

Nick Clegg spoke at the same conference. The Lib Dem Leader (pro tem) pointed out that “one in five children are on free school meals while only one in a hundred Oxbridge entrants [a]re”. To be fair to him, social mobility is an issue Clegg has long championed. A pity, then, that newspaper reports also suggest he is considering sending his eldest son to a top private school at a cost of £30,000 a year, rather undermining the case he so eloquently but insincerely prosecutes.

That’s the thing with social mobility: everyone’s in favour it, but hardly anyone in British politics is prepared to back up the grand rhetoric with practical action – let alone personal example. On a human level, where Mr and Mrs Clegg decide to send their son to school is none of my business; as parents they are entitled to want to do the best for their children. But his proposed action simply reinforces social hierarchy and inequality.

More’s the pity. There is nothing bleaker than wasting human potential. It mars an entire life. Narrowing the gap between the circumstances of our birth and where our abilities, talents and innate gifts have the potential to carry us is therefore a noble pursuit and one all parties should be actively – and equally – committed to.

So we need politicians to offer real, practical steps – not platitudinous waffle. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised that so many do. Just seven per cent of children attend private schools, yet 35 per cent of MPs did. As did 54 per cent of FTSE-100 chief executives and 70 per cent of judges. Inequality in Britain begins in short trousers.

Former health secretary Alan Milburn is a notable exception. He was brought up by a single parent in a housing estate before making his way to the Cabinet table, personifying the ideal that talent should rise to its fullest potential, regardless of means. He is invariably called the “social mobility czar” – a dizzying lack of self-awareness by some bright spark in the cabinet office. That’s right, our champion of equality likened to a Russian autocrat.

Nevertheless his latest report makes the point that our professions are riddled with nepotism, with a narrow and elitist approach to recruitment and work placements. Brilliant though his dissection of the problem is, it still requires a concerted attack on the very DNA of our professional classes to make any change. They will not acquiesce lightly in seeing their understanding of the natural order of things rearranged.

So are we making any progress? Depressingly, we are not much further forward than when Elizabeth Windsor first ascended to the throne in the days of grainy black and white newsreel. Despite Milburn finding we had a “golden age” of social mobility in the 1960s, movement has stalled in the past generation or so. Where you will end up in life is still determined by where you were born, who to and how much money they have.

And what little chance of change when we have universities charging £9000 a year, terrifying ordinary kids who simply cannot comprehend taking on more debt that many of their parents earn in a year. Meanwhile the government’s scrapping of the educational maintenance allowance is depriving poor college kids of a precious few quid for books and bus fares.

Most galling of all, however, we are obliged to maintain the fiction that private schools, (invariably called ‘public’ or ‘independent’, seemingly in a deliberate bid to confuse) are charitable organisations rather than fee-charging private enterprises. So they get tax breaks; allowing the working poor of Britain to pay their taxes to help subsidise boarding fees at Eton.

These citadels of social immobility may teach the offspring of moneyed social strivers a version of history that lauds imperial warmongers and drill dates into kids’ heads in order to shoehorn them through exams, but it does not make them smarter or more deserving than ordinary kids at comprehensive schools.

Frankly, David Cameron himself proves the point. An expensive Eton education did not even inculcate such basic facts as the point at which the Yanks joined the Second World War. Something my inner-city comprehensive managed to teach me.

Ultimately, real social mobility must start with a fundamental acceptance that we don’t have geniuses and imbeciles. We are, each of us, somewhere on a sliding scale in between, depending on how our intelligence and abilities are valued and measured; and each deserves the opportunity to make the most of theirs. Or to put it another way, those with birth advantages do not deserve to skip life’s opportunity queue.

This is the ambition which makes the unfettered pursuit of genuine social mobility the great domestic cause of our age. It just needs champions – real and committed ones – to fight for it. Perhaps the undeserved expense and pomp of this weekend will convince more of our politicians that it is a cause worth taking up?