Social climbing in the age of economic freefall

How would it be if we were all, each and every one of us, upwardly mobile? Tables in restaurants lacking burgers would be hard to come by. Schools where no teaching is done before the cheques clear would be packed. Honours lists would be less inclusive than universal. Executive boxes at the football would put health and safety at risk. Stock options would be a birthright.

It would count as the perfect egalitarian fairy tale. If everyone prospered, no one would ever be poor, and all would have prizes. Isn't this, inspiringly, what every politician of decent intent claims to seek? If we are not all rising like cream to the top, then society is, as David Cameron would have it, "broken". But Dave can fix it, apparently, for you and for me.

Gordon Brown wants to fix things too. In a speech on Monday the Prime Minister promised an autumn white paper designed to mobilise Britain socially. Come 2020, it turns out, we will need a 50% increase in "professional" jobs and a 90% decline in occupations requiring no skill. Social justice will cease to be defined as a matter of compensating the poor for deprivation, but rather as a process of helping us all to "develop".

Mr Brown admitted - it is impossible to deny - that there has been a "sharp drop" in mobility in recent decades. He argued, nevertheless, that improving school results - a fire-the-speechwriter moment, I think - "give us a platform for a new era of accelerating social mobility".

The Prime Minister was talking, though he would choke on the word, about class. The son of the manse was suggesting, again, that getting on and getting out is the ambition of the virtuous. It is his version of the Protestant ethic. But I have no idea what he means and neither, I suspect, does Mr Brown.

Start with the obvious. A Labour Party once dedicated to cradle-to-grave care has had to confess that child and pensioner poverty is increasing once more. Hence Mr Brown's speech: "we will not retreat from our commitment or resign those children to their fate". But what is a commitment worth, in today's money?

Such is the essence of mobility : it means being better off. How does that square with income inequalities that have widened faster and further under Labour than any Tory government? How is it reconciled with the 10p tax band fiasco, a startling attempt to take from the poor and give to the modestly prosperous?

How does it play, meanwhile, for a public sector worker being offered a 2.5% pay rise, locked in for three years, when last month the Consumer Price Index was upwardly mobile to the tune of 3.3%, and the slightly less dishonest Retail Price Index was topping 4.4%, even with the trivial detail of mortgage-interest payments stripped out?

My attempts at social mobility foundered on hard sums, but even I can spot a flaw. No one is "accelerating" when they are being asked to live with a real-money pay cut. And they cannot easily agonise over the perils of inflation when the Bank of England base rate - or, come to that, the Bank of England - has no bearing on economic reality.

I am curious, too, about Mr Brown's ideal, professionalised world in which a graduate-heavy employee class soars on the updrafts of the knowledge economy. Education is a good thing: I get it. But sending young people into the world with average student debts topping £17,000 does not seem, on the face of it, like the first rung on anyone's ladder. Pay-as-you-learn is not, in one of the Prime Minister's favourite words, an investment.

Nor is it wise to pretend that mobility is actually available to the millions who know better. GDP growth, general prosperity, and average earnings are the great myths of modern Britain. Each is distorted beyond recognition by self-selection in education and economic power. Start with City bonuses and work your way down. A long way down.

Even before globalisation's gears began to crunch, millions in Britain knew the score. Their pay packets did not reflect the prosperity of which they had heard so much. Credit, packaged debt, offered the appropriate illusions for the best part of a decade. But the tide did not, in fact, raise all boats, and education was no liberation.

What are all of Mr Brown's 2020 "professionals" supposed to do, exactly? Offer the social utility of the average journalist? So we get our oil from Saudi, our gas from Russia, our shoes from China, our sustainable veg from east Africa, and our debt obligations from the globalised souk? No one in these parts will make anything, or do anything a graduate wouldn't do, and the knowledge economy will pay all bills? Remind me: how's that one working out?

Mr Cameron says that mobility has been "blocked" because Labour will not adopt his schools policy. Some toffs were aggrieved, you will recall, when the Crewe by-election was marred by rude things said about toffs. But what should interest us more: a Tory leader promising social ascent for all, or the remarkable coincidence that provides Britain, in the 21st century, with a shadow cabinet dominated by the products of a handful of exceedingly expensive schools?

Dave would have us all rise from our humble origins and prosper. His team points to the reality: if you want to get on, go to Eton. The shadow team, in statistically improbable numbers, certainly did.

I once had a lecturer in logic whose life I made miserable by my effortless stupidity. His party piece was to demonstrate that a true liberal democracy, responding to the beliefs and views of every citizen, was a logical impossibility. He was a conservative sort, though, and he believed (illogically) in upward mobility. The children of his credulity, like the thinkthank Progress, share the faith.

That group advocates education credits for the "disadvantaged" (ponder the word). "Choice", "alternative providers", and the franchising of everything from jobcentres to GP practices are among the notions. Mobility will be turbocharged as a result, it is claimed. What could be more pleasant, more aspirational, than to be middle-class and mobile? Such is the view - who'd have guessed? - from the thinking middle class.

As I tried to suggest at the top of this piece, there is something askew with the argument that mobility between classes, like economic growth, can be ever-upward, ever-onward. There is something dishonest, too, in pretending that market disciplines will cure all ills when those invented disciplines are causing so much grief. Will upward mobility help anyone to work out the connection between a 2.5% pay offer, a fictitious inflation rate, and the tripling of the price of a loaf?

Given the choice between the fantasy of a universal middle class and economic security, most people would not hesitate. Of course they are better off, most of them, for now, than their parents. Why not? They, not the politicians, earned it. But there are unpleasant fantasies at work when a prime minister and his rival utter the platitudes of eternal betterment in the midst of an economic crisis.