The Regressives 1: Social Mobility

Winston Smith from Orwell’s 1984 lives in a grim reality of squalor, loneliness and fear. He has no memory of life ever having been easier and all the available sources of information assure him that life is much better than under the former evil capitalist system.

But despite all he has learned at school and everything he hears from his party colleagues and the news screens he feels in his bones that the world is all wrong.

The truth, searching for it, finding it, and spreading it, he realizes is the only hope for the future. So Winston starts a diary to record the truth and in doing so commits the ultimate sin: thought crime.

If you feel in your bones, like Orwell’s protagonist, that despite the glittering façade of wealth and technology all around you that there is something terribly wrong with the world, I will hazard a few guesses.

·        You are a grumpy old man.

·        You don’t have much of a sex life.

·        Worse, you no longer particularly want one!

·        You have not enjoyed the success that such a smart chap as you deserves.

After all, these possibilities have caused many in the prime of life to take a jaundiced view of the world.

But if you can dismiss them, there is another possibility: that there really is something terribly wrong.

And that there is one basic reason for it.

One simple reason why, for example:

·        Governments have never spent so much and yet been so ineffective.

·        There is no real choice in elections.

·        Thought crime is now a reality in societies whose proudest boast a generation ago was of freedom of speech.

·        Social bonds and standards of behavior are dissolving.

·        The family is going out of business.

·        Our very identity is under constant assault.

The reason for this malaise in Britain is a political philosophy that has captured the hearts and minds of our elites. Its grip is so strong that merely disagreeing with its tenets is enough to label yourself a bigot, and for more serious offences can land you in prison.

The believers call themselves “progressives” and no doubt this gives them a warm fuzzy feeling all over. This in turn explains the annoying smug expression they wear on their faces identifying them as surely as a swastika armband does a Nazi.

But not least in the catalogue of liberal infamy is their treatment of the English language. And the word “progressive” itself is a prime example. It is so laughingly inappropriate to use it to describe a philosophy that has ruined so many lives that it is tempting to assume its use is a sick in-joke among leftists. Yet, a brief acquaintance with liberal chatter will quickly reveal that using words (e.g., investment, positive discrimination, racism etc…) denoting the opposite of what they mean is so much the norm as to be regarded as a psychosis.

But such is the hold of “progressive” thought over the minds of our leaders, journalists and teachers that anyone who opposes it is left, like Winston Smith, with little choice but to point out the truth and hope for the best.

With that in mind, let’s start with a more accurate name. They are “The Regressives” and it’s not yet clear if they will see the error of their ways before they bring the whole show down around our ears. To adapt the epitaph to Sir Christopher Wren: “Reader if you seek their memorial …look around. "

First in their litany of disaster is their attempt to create a better future for all in a more just Britain.

Social Mobility

The opportunity to migrate upward through the classes is the clearest indicator of a healthy and vibrant society.

What could be better and more just than living in a meritocracy where your fate in life is entirely determined by your ability and industry.

Social mobility or the lack of it has become a major concern in Britain. There have been 6 major reports into it in the past 10 years. David Cameron the coalition leader is so concerned that he employed the former Labour cabinet minister, Alan Milburn, in the role of the government’s social mobility ‘Tsar’.

So, after 12 years of his Labour colleagues’ feverish social engineering you might expect regressive Alan to be pretty upbeat about things.

Not a bit of it.

On a BBC Radio 4 programme he declared more in righteous anger than in sorrow that “We still live in a country where, invariably, if you're born poor, you die poor.”

His solution, paradoxically, was to advise more of the same policies that had worked so well for Blair, but with a greater emphasis on knocking heads together. Elite universities, for example, must be forced to accept more candidates from the working class.

And if the situation is really so bad that those born poor ‘invariably’ die poor, perhaps kicking a bit of vice chancellor butt would be a price worth paying.

That is if we were talking about the real world, and not planet liberal.

In the real world as far as social mobility is concerned, Britain is actually doing pretty well.

If we divide the working population into three main social classes, more than half of us are in a different class from the one we were born into.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report The persistence of poverty across generations, 2006 describes a healthy society in which:

The probability of a boy living with poor parents in the 1970s being in poverty when he reached his thirties was 19%, as compared with a 10% probability for those whose parents were not poor. Growing up in poverty thus doubles your risk of ending up poor yourself, but more than 4 in 5 still escape this fate. 

Research on two cohorts of children born in 1958 and 1970 similarly finds that more than 40% of them were upwardly mobile by their early thirties, while more than a quarter moved down.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Britain is still a relatively free society and in a free society people are free to pursue happiness.

This situation, though, is far from perfect… for regressives. Free people solving their own problems doesn’t exactly blow leftie skirts up. And so while it’s hard to resist such a fundamental drive as the pursuit of happiness, lefties have beavered away to this end with what can only be described as a religious fervour.

Disregarding the lottery and sports stardom, there are two main routes out of the valley of despair: education and work. It’s taken generations of unceasing effort, but the  regressives have set up reasonably effective road blocks on both.

In education, (take a deep breath) by closing the grammar schools, opposing streaming, discouraging competition, promoting “progressive” teaching methods, refusing to fire useless teachers and neutralising the single greatest force for improvement in education, i.e., parent power, they have blighted the prospects of the poorest and most vulnerable.

In the area of work, by paying benefits simply on the basis of ‘need’ and unlinked to any personal responsibility they have managed to trap millions exactly where they want them: permanently dependent on the state. The unlikelihood of finding work that pays more than sitting on your arse discourages most escape attempts.

But even more effective than either of these is the weaselly propaganda.  With their endless tales of woe about the evils of our imperfect but free society, they have convinced millions of their hopeless position and so sapped their will to strive for a better future.

After all, the pre-requisite of the fight for a better life is the belief that it is possible.

But on the plus side…they do mean well.