Here’s something I’ve been wondering recently: is there anybody left on these isles who persists in the belief that we inhabit a meritocracy? Anyone still sold on the “work hard, get ahead” land of opportunity narrative? If so, please show me your workings. In light of yet another dispiriting social mobility survey – this one from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Cambridge, and Harvard, which found that graduates from poorer backgrounds earn less than richer peers on the same course – you’d have to throw some contortionist intellectual shapes to make the argument.

The gap between rich and poor remains a gulf. Even when you’ve been to the same university and had the same education, the disadvantages of coming from a poor family can mean earning around 20% less. As this latest study shows, there is a marked link between parental income and a child’s potential earnings.

The British attitude to social mobility has become, for many people, fatalistic

While to an outsider our class system is baffling in its rigidity, to most insiders it is largely immovable. The British attitude to social mobility has become, for many people, fatalistic. “You are dealt the cards that you are dealt in this life, and you make the best of your situation,” a young man said to me recently. “But doesn’t it make you angry?” I asked, of the rampant social inequality, the housing crisis, the food banks, all set against a background of millionaire tax-dodging and property hogging. “It is what it is,” he said.

It is what it is. Leave aside the fact that I can’t imagine a continental European ever uttering such words of resignation, and examine what such an attitude means. We know that the reasons behind sluggish social mobility are incredibly complex – the attention you receive (or don’t) from your parents; their attitude to education and advancement; your diet; whether or not you have a clean, warm space in which to do your homework; the support and faith of your teachers; the employment prospects in your area; a community (or lack thereof); your access to contraception – these are all factors. We also know that making it so far can only do so much.

Say you’ve made it to university, and you’ve got on to a course with people who went to places like Eton and Harrow. You might even graduate with first-class honours, but you still don’t have the networks and contacts that your richer peers have. There’s not the implicit or overt pressure to earn a lot of money in your family like there probably is in theirs.

You don’t already act and sound like a confident, polished senior professional even though you’re 21. You get a decent enough job, and spend much of your time being so passionately grateful for that you don’t ask for that pay rise, or apply for a position for which you’re under-qualified and, through sheer brio, might have got. In other words: you’ve made it, ish. But not as far as they will.

This is what people mean when they say “it is what it is”. It’s another way of admitting that your world is only so big, that most people can only get so far. One thing the Panama leaks have put into focus is the fact that to the very rich, people like David Cameron and his circle, the world is enormous. It’s a world of second homes and luxury escapes, of international finance and contacts. From the nannies and au pairs you employ to care for your children and the builders to dig out your basement, to the accountants and lawyers who arrange your offshore tax affairs, their community is global, their horizons distant. Their world is wide, wide, wide, and it’s expanding.

When you’re poor, your world is small. Sometimes this is a happy and convenient arrangement – your nan can watch the kids while you do the afternoon shift, for instance, and you’re surrounded by people who love you and make you laugh. But sometimes it is like a whirlpool threatening to drag you under, because no matter how far you get, it feels as though something is pulling you back – whether it’s cashflow, or caring responsibilities, or a lack of job opportunities.

People who have wrenched themselves out of poverty are so often held up as examples of meritocracy working, as opposed to the outliers that they are. There is a class ceiling. Most of us stay where we are.

When you’ve had a kid at 15, finishing your degree from the local college can feel like you’re reaching for the stars. When you’ve been a carer for a disabled child for so long you don’t know who you are any more, a stable income feels like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When your name comes up on the council house waiting list. When you make it as far as Manchester, or Liverpool, or London. When you pay your taxes and can help your family out a bit financially, all the while hoping the next lot get a little further than you did. Well, then you feel like your world has expanded as much as it can.

It is what it is. For most of us, anyway. But don’t tell me that it’s a meritocracy.