Labour’s leadership hopefuls need to ditch ‘aspiration’ and start talking about ‘meritocracy’

As the post-mortem of Labour’s election defeat takes place in the midst of the party’s leadership election, observers can’t help but have noticed the term ‘aspiration’ persistently cropping up in the language of the three main contenders. The theory is that Labour failed to appeal to those in the middle in the last campaign, because its manifesto and campaign was too narrowly focused on the interests of those at the bottom.

Therefore, we have this focus on ‘aspiration’, but what is meant by this term isn’t entirely clear. It seems for some people it’s about where people shop (John Lewis etc.), for others it’s about lowering tax or being more business-friendly. Surely the candidates and the Labour Party would be better served by making a more substantial pitch to the voters they failed to reach last time around, in which case why not talk about ‘meritocracy’?

Meritocracy is back on the political agenda. Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission recently released a report highlighting the UK’s perennial problem of social immobility still remains. Milburn’s report in particular highlighted the ‘poshness test’ seemingly employed by top-end employers to exclude more working class candidates. However, the problem seems to be much wider than this. Out of the thirteen employers in the study by Milburn, 70% of the graduates they employed last year came from selective-state or fee-paying schools. When you compare this to the amount of students who go to these schools out of the whole population – 11% – the scale of the problem becomes even clearer. 

Surely this is fertile ground for a Labour party attempting to reach the majority of the country once more? A focus on improving these figures can appeal to the working-class support that was so eroded in May’s election, as well as reaching out to the more middle-class voters that Labour needs to win over if it has any hope of victory in 2020 or beyond. Remember that the vast majority of parents in this country send their children to state schools, and the argument can be made that the top industries are not drawing on enough of that majority’s children to populate its top professions. 

If Labour discards the vague and empty concept of ‘aspiration’ and takes up the mantle of social reform, mobility and meritocracy as it has done before it could reshape itself as the true party of working people once more. This would also stymie the bizarre efforts of the Conservative party to re-brand itself as the ‘Worker’s Party’ while at the same time addressing a fundamental and age-old problem at the heart of British society. Everyone agrees that this is a problem, but Labour must be the party and is the only party to do something about it.