Does Labour want an anti-CV revolution?

Alison McGovern, Labour’s shadow employment minister is one of those politicians  who are always worth watching. She combines the ability to look and speak like a normal human being – a rare thing at Westminster – with a genuine policy wonk’s fascination for data and trends and ideas.  

She also has fans at the top of the Labour party. While other shadow ministers are rendered almost mute by the message discipline of Team Starmer, McGovern has the confidence and license to think out loud. 

This week she was at the Social Market Foundation to talk about social mobility, which covers a lot of ground. 

There were several significant takeaways from that event, some of which I’ll try to capture briefly here.

• The Labour war on ‘social mobility’ is over. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour declared that the whole concept was effectively a right-wing failure: Angela Rayner promised to scrap Whitehall’s social mobility machinery and focus instead on a wider ‘social