It’s [Social mobility is] very difficult to achieve, it’s extremely complex, we don’t know how to do it. Nobody knows how to make it popular, nobody can talk about it [in] a way that any normal person can understand. It is, in every single respect, a terrible objective for a politician. (Philip Collins, quoted in Wheeler 2013)

Philip Collins, a lead writer for The Times, may also be a sociologist in disguise. If social mobility were to fade from political view, then most sociologists would shed few tears. Collins echoes much of what was argued earlier in Chapter Seven: that increasing social mobility requires a reform of the whole economic and social system. But ignoring the issue is the wrong thing to do. Social mobility is a prism through which the whole system of society can viewed, and in doing so, this highlights where the flaws are. And like prisms, social mobility has many facets. The one-dimensional presentation of social mobility favoured by the majority of politicians and academics, doesn’t do justice to what examining social mobility can tell us, nor what changing it could achieve. Ironically, it is those politicians with the least knowledge about it who are most able to recognise that there may be a range of ways in which individuals can be socially mobile, and that it is what ‘progress’ and ‘success’ means (as well as how ‘stratification’ is defined) that makes up social mobility. While ignorance should seldom be seen as a virtue where matters of policy are concerned, being unencumbered by the parameters that define previous thinking can be an advantage. And even accepting that social mobility may be about more than intergenerational occupational change (or income change) is a start.

While Collins is correct in suggesting that the present political approach to looking at social mobility has its limitations, it also has a distinctive appeal. It seems to tick a number of boxes where today’s anxieties are concerned. There is no guarantee that a broader and certainly more complicated definition would do this, especially if it challenges head on the ideas and vested interests associated with the current approach. The essence of the new politics of social mobility is not just a matter of deciding what issues are now encompassed by social mobility and the policies to address them, but also whether the space to do this exists or can be created.