I have been writing about social mobility ever since I became socially mobile. Or published. Or bought off or changed class. Whatever you want to call it. The milieu I found myself in the late 80s was new to me then. It is often still new to me: the huge assumptions, the peculiar gradations, the tiny judgments, the painful self-imposed restraint of the middle classes make for a place that can never be my home. I squat there, on some temporary contract. For class as it is often lived can feel like an essence or even elixir, although this is denied. It is comforting to think that anyone can switch class, be mobile, that anyone can make themselves up. Not many do, though.

These days, however, class can feel less fluid than gender. There is a stuckness and a maintenance of that stuckness. Alan Milburn tells us once more that this country has a deep problem with social mobility. For the young, this is getting worse not better.

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The country is deeply divided geographically, economically and generationally. Where you end up is absolutely tied to where you start out. Grit and meritocracy are the lubricating myths that fuel the getaway cars.

What’s new? The Institute for Fiscal Studies told us that most measures of income poverty and inequality had increased in the year of 2005/2006, after almost 10 years of Tony Blair. The gap between the rich and poor became obvious, but another gap opened up – the gap between the middle class and the super-rich. Not only did we stand by and watch it open, but the country let itself be governed by these people. The old money of the Camerons financed an arrogance whereby someone who wasn’t an economist could wreck the economy (George Osborne), someone who wasn’t a teacher who could ruin education (Michael Gove) and someone who wasn’t really anything could lead us accidentally out of Europe (David Cameron). The big money of a small man (Arron Banks) bankrolled the anti-immigrant campaign of a stockbroker (Nigel Farage) whose shtick was to refigure working-class authenticity purely as resentment.

All these people pretend a concern about social mobility. As does Theresa May. This is fake. Key components of rightwing ideology are that anyone can make it, although the evidence is to the contrary. They also maintain that those born into privilege deserve what they have.

So, isn’t equality rather like world peace? A vague goal? A win-win set up? But it can’t be, can it? The jobs and careers that are seen as the birthright of the middle classes could be taken by those brought up in lowlier circumstances. In my experience, middle-classness is not only about income. It is to do with the entitlement to a certain kind of life, and that life has to be defined as innately superior to that of the masses. This is why the middle class is perpetually anxious in its signalling. Underfloor heating is acceptable. A hot tub out the back isn’t.

The accruing of cultural capital as well as education is part of social mobility. The accomplishments of the middle class are largely extracurricular, after all. A child is well-rounded if it has done something more than school. That something is privatised.

Corbyn’s promise of ending tuition fees has been criticised as a bung to the middle classes, but it can be seen as a generational redistribution after the past few years of hurt. Every institution has blurbs about widening access and participation, yet we find ourselves in a situation where even after graduation, employment for disadvantaged students has barely improved. When education stalls as the engine of social mobility, then where do we go?

The young, especially after the election, are seen as the new voting formation, one that has largely been failed, one that proudly identifies as citizens of nowhere. They have taken over from the preoccupation of last year: the left-behinds. I always found the left-behinds, that euphemism for the white working class, very odd, partly because the working class is not only white, but also because to become socially mobile, one deliberately leaves things behind. The valorisation of the worst parts of working-class culture by public-school leftists is the worst kind of of snobbery.

It also ignores how gender and mobility intersect. If you want to know what makes someone socially mobile, ask them. Obviously, it will be education. I left school at 16, but went back to college as a mature student. But as important to me as education was both housing and childcare. As a single parent in my mid-20s, I could not have studied without the childcare that was provided. Today’s young working-class mothers do not have this. They and their kids may well find it hard however smart and driven they are.

The question remains, though: do we actually want a more equal society? There is nothing mystical about all this. It is a matter of political will. The intervention required is not a single interventionist policy. It is way bigger. Those who have never had a playing field know these fields are not level. Those who play on them are happy enough with uneven ground. Otherwise, they would not continue to cultivate it.