There have always been, and will always be, three classes of people.
- The top 1%
- The successful people who work hard
- The unsuccessful people who'd rather whine than work
The top 1% controls political parties, so no matter who is in power, they win.
The other two parties take turns to keep a balance, so people feel like they're making progress, but never actually are.
There's nothing stopping someone from advancing under the right conditions, the problem is the conditions are usually not right, if your parent are lazy they aren't going to push you to better yourself, and so it continues.
Tony is a hard worker, he earns somewhere above minimum wage due the need for flexibility as he is also the primary carer for his disabled wife. He works 45 hour weeks, he would work more but his wife's care needs require him to be at home. He doesn't own a property so rents on the private market. The household receives some benefits due to his wife's condition but he also has two school age children to support, further limiting his ability to take on additional work. He doesn't have the time or money to retrain and, whilst he has been applying for higher paid work a messy upbringing has meant that he is not confident in his ability to write and as such his CV leaves a lot to desire, as does his perceived skillset. Due to the factors above the household join the 21.6% of people in the Country deemed to be living in relative poverty, Tony's family probably fall towards the extreme edge of this.
He has considered moving to a cheaper area or to a location where he might have greater prospects, however he is nervous about uprooting the kids, would need to give up the already limited support network in the local area which helps him with his responsibilities, and also lacks the capital to pay for moving fees, another deposit etc.
Tony is completely fictional but entirely plausible. Which of your three categories does he fit into?
I think the desire to fit everybody into these little pockets is part of the problem, it's not a case of identifying problem demographics (e.g. why aren't more BME background young people opting to attend university? Not the be all and end all of education but it impacts on statistics further down the line like BME CEOs). The issue is around deleting barriers to entry, because a lot of the barriers to social mobility are shared across high priority demographics. For instance in poorer families and ethnic minority families there is a need for young people to start earning ASAP to help support the family, so if we're trying to encourage that person to forgo work for a while in order to pursue further education then what are we doing to support those families? The apprenticeship route is one option but even with the move away from manual vocations what do we do in the case of a child from a poor background with a gift for the sciences? Grant funding won't cut it.
There's no easy answer, and I'm not sure, even with all the rhetoric, that there's a will within the political classes to really address this. Ironically is we can promote social mobility towards the political class then the problem would likely take off. More people coming from poorer backgrounds should mean a better understanding and a greater will within Westminster.
