Social mobility has become a meaningless mantra

‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to climb to the top’. So, too, Tony Blair in 2004 (‘I want to see social mobility a dominant factor of British life’), David Cameron in 2015 (‘Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world — we cannot accept that’) and Theresa May in 2016 (‘I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege’). Put another way, for the best part of four decades equality of outcome was largely on the back burner; equality of opportunity was, at least in theory, the name of the game, and social mobility became one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes, like corporate social responsibility in the business world, which it was almost rude not to sign up to and utter warm words about.

Perhaps no longer. The world of Covid, exposing huge material inequalities, has underscored the importance of collective rather than individual endeavour.