Janan Ganesh: No room at top while rich hog all the space

Only beside a future king could Kate Middleton (millionaire parents, premium education) count as normal. Only after David Cameron could Theresa May (vicar's daughter, English Home Counties for life) hail "ordinary working-class people" eight times in one speech as though she were their natural tribune. The privileged can pass for plain as long as aristocratic blood does not course through them, such is the mad tapestry of British social class.

The prime minister’s cheeky pose as Everywoman can be forgiven if, to back it up, she makes social mobility the point of her government. Last week’s speech suggests she is serious. A leader who even entertains academic selection – knowing bien pensants are strident in defence of all those comprehensive schools they do not use – is putting her political capital where her good intentions are. Any move to selection, even one as slight and hedged as hers, will be smeared as a lurch to mid-20th century grammars in all their inequity.

The trouble with this debate is not just the hysteria. It may also not matter very much who is right. May can improve schools a bit, through whatever means, and leave only a scratch on entrenched privilege.

Struggle to rise

Unless the total stock of prestigious and well-paid jobs grows as it did in the postwar decades, which seems fanciful, talented poor children will struggle to rise unless mediocre rich children fall. There must be, to name the best film on class from the era, room at the top.

That room rarely opens up because those mediocrities are too well-screened by parents who hire private tutors, buy cultural enrichment, teach etiquette, set expectations, stand as personal examples of success, coach interview technique, navigate any bureaucratic maze put before them, set up home in nice areas, arrange internships via friends and, just to rub in their supremacy, make direct gifts of cash and assets. To fail under these conditions is a kind of achievement in itself.

No chess grand­master can out-think an upper-middle-class couple trying to rig life for its spawn. This awesome ingenuity is what you are up against, prime minister. If you want a “truly meritocratic Britain”, not just a slightly more meritocratic one, you must bring something mightier to the cause than a tweak to school admissions criteria. The policy is not too controversial – it is not controversial enough.

The state would have to curb personal freedom, even human nature, to make downward mobility a serious risk for people born to rich parents. Would voters support confiscatory taxes on inheritance and lifetime gifts, the criminalisation of nepotism, the regulation of work experience, tutors and other kinds of “soft” cheating?

Would the well-off pay taxes for universal public services if schools in poor districts had much smaller class sizes than those in their own coveted catchment areas? The rich compound their privileges by marrying each other: what chance government diktat in matters of the heart?

To spell out the reforms is to see their political unthinkability. Almost everybody talks a good game about social mobility and almost nobody means it. They want a world in which their kin cannot move down, or even feel the shiver of insecurity at the prospect. This impulse is entirely natural but it should not be cloaked in a pretence of concern for fairness and merit. After all, no one who dislikes brute notions of victory and defeat feigns enthusiasm for professional sport. Egalitarians do not flatter free-market ideology. But people who insulate their offspring from competition make a show of wishing poor young aspirants the very best.

Two faces of luck

Anyone who has risen to an elevated line of work that was not their own from birth –

Justine Greening

, the education secretary, for example – knows the two faces of luck. In every classroom, there are children who could aspire to her job (or mine, or yours) but will never know it. In every grand office, there are people who got there through the expensive cultivation of unremarkable talent. They do not know it either. Until the second injustice upsets us as much as the first, we do not really care about the first.

May wants a society where individual potential, performance and reward are aligned. Barring a sudden and historic proliferation of attractive jobs such as nobody sees coming, she must therefore want more people of her class to take a tumble in life, and to will the means via government policy.

She does not, and neither do many people.

Maybe we go to war over marginal differences in school structure because other kinds of advantage are too awkward to confront.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016