The Limits of ‘Opportunity’: Is There a Clear Labour or Conservative View of Social Mobility?

A constant disappointment in recent British politics has been the perceived stagnation in social mobility. There have been numerous reports expressing frustration over this stasis in the past fifteen years, especially those produced by the Social Mobility Commission (SMC).

Underneath this practical concern, though, there is a deeper theoretical debate about the concept’s meaning. There have been attempts to redefine and reframe social mobility, based on differing views about how to balance, on one hand, reward for society’s ‘winners’ with, alternately, recognition for all in society’s varied walks of life.

Overall, despite these manoeuvres, new views on left and right have struggled to negotiate past the pre-established views that exist on the topic. A wrench away from the dominant ideas is taking place, but those ideas still remain strong.

The Birbalsingh insurgency, 2021–23

One recent radical voice on social mobility has been the headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh. On being appointed to lead the SMC in 2021, Birbalsingh’s message was that it required a ‘fresh approach’. In her June 2022 inaugural speech, she said it was important ‘to promote a broader view of social mobility, for a wider range of people, who want to improve their lives, sometimes in smaller steps.’

Birbalsingh had been a Conservative pick for her SMC role and is broadly Conservative-aligned in her thought. Nonetheless, she was given a negative press in some Tory quarters for her inaugural speech, leading to her decision to stand down as chair in January 2023. To explain this puzzling controversy, it helps to differentiate four views of social mobility.

The liberal view

In the established liberal view, the goal is to provide a ‘level playing field’ to decide who moves upwards in society. While there is an acknowledgement that not everyone can succeed, there is a meritocratic commitment to the idea that everyone should have a fair chance to do so.

Foundational to the liberal view is New Labour’s 2000s concept of an ‘opportunity society’. In this dream, people who previously had been prevented from moving upwards would be facilitated to do so by a policy of ‘fair access to the professions’.

The socialist view

Against the liberal view, there is a radical left-wing view of social mobility: the socialist view. The socialist view fundamentally criticises the concept of a ‘level playing field’ of competitive ‘opportunity’ for access to the elite. In the socialist view, there should be no elite, and therefore no competition to enter it.

The socialist view is distinctive because it puts emphasis on collective social mobility. The cornerstone is that people should rise as a unit, and that moving everyone upwards together requires a levelling-out of material and structural disadvantage.

The postliberal view

The insurgent view on the right, the postliberal view, is where we find Birbalsingh’s ‘smaller steps’ message. The postliberal argument made by Birbalsingh is not that of collectivism and structural change. Rather, it is that someone’s upwards mobility might not involve a pathway into the professions, and might indeed be better situated within a community where the person has a strong sense of belonging.

Stating this view, Birbalsingh’s inaugural speech talked of people from less affluent backgrounds making ‘smaller steps’ within their local community: ‘If a child of parents who were long-term unemployed, or who never worked, gets a job in their local area, isn’t that a success worth celebrating?’

This view has been half-adopted by Keir Starmer in his rhetoric on ‘opportunity’. The Labour leader’s ‘smaller steps’-type message has revolved particularly around his toolmaker father, expressing sadness that his father’s vocational pathway was not praised by society.

However, like a radio flipping between frequencies, Starmer’s rhetoric alternates between this view and the New Labour dream, as it champions working-class children with ‘ambitions’ rising upwards to join the professions. Trying to put forward both the postliberal view and the latter liberal view to cover all bases, Starmer’s rhetoric ignores how these views are mutually incompatible. The postliberal view confronts prestige hierarchies, yet the liberal view is premised on them.

The bourgeois view

The bourgeois view, lastly, could be classed as the liberal view’s ‘establishment’ counterpart, but pays regard to something different. The liberal view is primarily process-centred, excited by widening access to the competitive game of ‘ladder-climbing’. The bourgeois view’s attention is to ‘product’: making sure that the traditional social mobility ‘trophies’, such as getting into Oxbridge, are still recognised as supreme.

Socially, the bourgeois view reflects the attitudes of the Daily Telegraph, perhaps the quintessential newspaper of the Tory middle England shires. When the Telegraph reported on Birbalsingh’s speech in June 2022, it carried a critical edge. Stating that Birbalsingh wanted poorer young people to ‘take “smaller steps” rather than aiming for Oxbridge’, its subtext was that Birbalsingh was undermining working-class aspiration.

The Telegraph’s pretext, though, was to protect the prestige recognition of Oxbridge as a traditional ‘trophy’. Responding to the Telegraph in a piece for Schools Week, Birbalsingh doubled down on her position and made clear that it was this bourgeois view that she opposed: ‘There are different social mobility narratives for different people, and we shouldn’t be putting them in hierarchies which implies that some are inferior to the others. We need them all.’

Conclusion

The concept of opportunity is limited in the established liberal and bourgeois views of social mobility, and those limits are challenged by the alternate socialist and postliberal views. Birbalsingh’s postliberal view questioned whether academic-professional achievement should be valued more than ‘smaller steps’ in the local community.

This message has been adopted partially by Labour, and rebuked by traditional sections of Conservative opinion. So now we have Labour confusion and Conservative contestation: a state of unfinished business in the politics of social mobility.