Deborah Orr: Can society's 'losers' really be saved?

In his foreword to the social mobility white paper, Gordon Brown makes a wonderfully soothing claim. "There is no longer," he says, "a national limit to the number and quality of jobs that will be available to the British people."

Let's imagine for a moment what one important implication of this statement would be, if only it were not a delusion. There would no longer be any need for the already successful to fret about social mobility, and worry that unless they buy advantage for their children, they run the risk of failing. There is room at the top for everyone, apparently. No one has to give up their place at university, in order that someone poorer but more clever can have it instead.

How bitterly the parents of Oxbridge-aspiring offspring resent the idea that a child with two As and a B from a school they would rather rip their arm off than expose their own child to, might possibly be more intelligent that a child crammed for three As at a top public school. How fearful they are of challenge to their supremacy. But in Brown's new nation, the affluent classes no longer have to feel threatened. There will be so many top jobs that employers will no longer be able to afford the luxury of seeking out those who boast an elite education.

Presently, there is no shortage at all of grumbling voices, from parents who feel that they are pilloried for doing exactly what the Government tells them to do – nurturing their children's aspirations, even if they are not so very bright. They hog the good schools, they buy their children private tuition, or if they don't to that, they help them too much with their homework and take them to too many museums. They teach the difference between brie and camembert at three, and expose them at an even earlier age to Radio 4. They seize the unfair advantages conferred by what Brown calls "the accident of birth and social background", and hold on to them for dear life.

But in Brown's world – even though he seems sometimes to disapprove of such selfishness on principle – there is absolutely no need for such competitive resentment. Labour is concerned only with working out how to "remove all barriers, whether financial, cultural or aspirational", so that anyone who wishes to put in a bit of effort can join the privileged. That's what the social mobility paper is all about – pretending that in a globalised free market system, provided that it operates with appropriate state intervention, there can only be winners. They have learned nothing at all in the last decade.

Certainly, Labour's policies, many of which are already in operation, or already in the planning stages, will create more winners, if only they work. They emphasise early years support; success in school; investment in transitional years from compulsory education through further or higher education; and fresh opportunities to get on in work throughout people's lives.

In other words, they seek to provide, through the structure of the state, the support that children of the educated or affluent tend to take for granted. All of this, Labour has already been trying to do throughout its time in Government, and it admits that its success has been limited, even within this jauntily upbeat can-do paper. The only really new initiative, after all, is to make the removal of "cultural barriers" to high-status professions "a core function of key public services". Everyone understands that this proposed legislation is designed to mitigate the stubborn stranglehold of "the old-boys network", which has barely loosened its grip at all, despite Labour's 10 years of assault on it.

Now, if you ask the old boys themselves, they will insist that the most successful challenge any Government ever mounted on the old-boy network was the grammar-school system. The aspirational like grammars because they provide a space for something similar to public schools within the state system.

Nobody else likes them – not even the leadership of the Conservative Party any more – because they also mimic the disadvantages created by the private school system. Everyone left outside the magic circle suffers from the state's selection and nurture of those from aspirational families (or, less often, those unsupported at home, but clever).

In the counties where grammar schools still operate – especially Kent – this effect is plain to see. In such areas, education attainment tends to be lower than in areas working a comprehensive system. The grammar school system is very good for those on the inside, and very bad for those on the outside.

What is worrying about the Government's plans is that they employ the rhetoric of the grammar school system, and its ambitions for academic success and professional qualification, even though they oppose the system itself. All of the emphasis is on creating winners – to the point where Brown himself insists that there is no need at all, in some future Britain where only highly skilled people in highly skilled jobs live, for anyone to be a "loser" at all.

This emphasis itself consigns the "losers" to almost literal oblivion. Except of course, that the "losers" aren't factory fodder any longer. A nastier fate, membership of the despised and feared underclass, awaits them.

The trouble with this agonising over what the privileged have, is that it ignores the power of what's said to be the most important thing of all – family. The advantages conferred by a rich, powerful, highly educated family are irksome to those who do not share them. So is the gargantuan sense of entitlement cultivated in those brought up to believe that absolutely anything is theirs for the taking. Their confident and accurate belief that the system is "on their side", and that their participation in society will be beneficial to them, makes them almost unassailable.

But the disadvantages meted out by lack of support from a poor, powerless, educationally disadvantaged family are so psychologically devastating that the destruction is almost incomprehensible to anyone who has not seen it up close. The Government is on the right track with early years support, family intervention, "community inspiration" and so on. But it really needs to start asking itself whether the promise of high skills and fancy jobs for all is really one it is in a position to keep. Maybe simpler goals, like some respect – and a decent living wage – for more modest jobs, could start making "aspiration" seem like something worth aspiring to.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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