Introduction

Sociologists have been keen to portray a cross-party political consensus on social mobility (Goldthorpe 2012, Payne 2012) – the idea that it has stalled at best, or is going backwards at worst, appears to be shared by all the major political parties in Britain. However, politicians always arrive at their interpretation of an issue from the context of their own party and its ideology. Bracketing together different politicians’ views hampers an understanding of how and why social mobility has become such a high-profile issue. Crucially, it also masks the possible trajectories that social mobility could take into the future.

This chapter shows that while all the main political parties in the UK subscribe to some ‘truths’ on social mobility, they arrive at these by different routes, which then gives hope that they could leave in different directions too.

Social mobility and New Labour

The origins of the present concern about social mobility can be found in the 1990s and Labour’s desire to find a way to articulate the party’s core concern around inequality and poverty in a way that seemed to resonate with late 20th-century Britain. Labour had to find a way back to government as it was staring at what some thought was perennial opposition.

Where its views on inequality and poverty were concerned, this process began with the Commission on Social Justice report produced for the Labour Party in 1994 when in opposition (Commission on Social Justice 1994). It continued through the 1990s with the two dominant figures in Labour politics in the UK of that and the following decade, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, seeing social exclusion as a way of redefining what was once poverty and equality of opportunity (Levitas 1998). They were both keen to place education at the centre of how social exclusion would be addressed and equality of opportunity increased. Blair gave a famous speech in 2001, proclaiming that: ‘If we are given a second term to serve this country, our mission will be the renewal of our public services. There is nothing more important to making Britain a fairer and stronger country. Our top priority was, is and always will be education, education, education’ (Blair 2001).