Whether on policy or sartorial choices, the leaders of Britain's Conservative government and its opposition Labour Party could not be farther apart. Yet there is strong cross-party consensus around the view that social mobility is too low in Britain. Ironically, both parties may be wrong; or at least guilty of oversimplifying.
Prime Minister David Cameron, like every politician in his shoes since Tony Blair, has made tackling the problem a major goal of social policy. "Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world," Cameron told party faithful at their annual conference recently. People, he said, are unable to "rise from the bottom to the top, or even from the middle to the top, because of their background."
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