The millionaire toff Nick Clegg is fronting the government’s new “social mobility” scheme, a plan it says is aimed at making Britain “a fairer and more socially mobile place”.
The spectacle of a government claiming that it is attempting to make Britain “fairer,” while simultaneously carrying out an assault of unprecedented savagery on working-class living standards is gallingly hypocritical. The government’s strategy is based precisely on increasing the kind of social inequalities that Clegg claims they want to address with this “radical new package”.
Of course, the scheme is neither new nor radical.
It is a warmed-up version of proposals that Labour’s Alan Milburn made in 2009 as part of the “Report on Fair Access to the Professions”. Both that report, and the government’s new package, focus almost exclusively on unpaid internships as a primary source of social immobility.
Clegg claims that because young people from richer backgrounds can exploit family connections to get better internships, and because they can afford to spend several years working without pay because of family support (internships are frequently unpaid), they are given an automatic head-start when they enter the job market for real.
In a Daily Telegraph article, Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith (one of the chief architects of the dismantling of the welfare state) are at pains to point out that the target of the new social mobility package is “not just the poor” but the so-called “squeezed middle”, so beloved of mainstream politicians of all three parties.
So behind the bluster and rhetoric about “fairness” we have a very flimsy scheme aimed at helping middle-class kids get better jobs by giving them more access to internships.
A clampdown on unpaid internships is good, but “tinkering around the edges” is a massive overstatement here. This millionaire government lives in a fantasy world. Tory minister David Willetts has already gone on record blaming “feminism” for social inequality in Britain! The idea that inequality of opportunity in the race to get internships is the key factor behind Britain’s gaping wealth gaps is perhaps less bigoted but no less ludicrous.
In their Telegraph article, Clegg and Duncan Smith wrote: “We want a society in which success is based on what you know, not who you know or which family you are born into […] So our social mobility drive is aimed at helping the majority of people to move up the rungs of the ladder of opportunity.”
The drive is based on two great ideological lies of capitalism — meritocracy and “social mobility” itself. That lie says that if you “level the playing field”, people will be able to move upwards as long as they’ve got the (presumably innate) merit to do so.
In the ideal world of Clegg, Duncan Smith, Willetts and the rest, the people at “the bottom” would be the irredeemably lazy and/or stupid, and the people at the top would be those hard-working, go-getting few (from whatever background, of course) who took advantage of their opportunities.
They are capitalist utopians. For them, “a fair society is an open society, one in which opportunities are not determined by background but by drive and ability.” But where do “drive and ability” come from? Drive and ability are themselves products of, and conditioned by, class relations.
And class position itself is not about innate ability; it is based on power, and relationship to the means of production.
A child from a wealthy background gets her or his greater “drive” and ability from such things as access to education, a life free of stress, a life with expectations instilled by the experience of wealth and success.
Individuals from a given class can move up or down into another, but the fundamental inequalities in wealth and opportunity between classes as collective social groups cannot be addressed other than by overthrowing the entire class system.
Against the cons of social mobility and meritocracy, we fight for equality. We fight for a society without classes.