Social Mobility and Elite Recruitment in the UK
| Author | Bill Jones |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2041905820978840 |
28 POLITICAL INSIGHT • DECEMBER 2020
Britain is ‘the most class-ridden
country under the sun’. Those
words were written by George
Orwell more than 70 years ago,
but how true are they today? Is British
public life still dominated by a narrow
elite, or has the hidebound social hierarchy
softened since Orwell’s day?
In a democratic society, whether it is
possible to move from the very bottom to
the very top of society is a deeply political
question. Ernest Bevin went from being
orphaned at eight years of age and having
no formal education, to becoming a titan
of the trade union movement, the war
cabinet and post-war Foreign Secretary.
Social Mobility and
Elite Recruitment
in the UK
How possible it is for a person to start near the bottom of so ciety
and end up at the top? Is it getting easier, or harder? Bill Jones
looks at social mobility among Britain’s elite and finds few
reasons to be cheerful.
Is this more or less likely today? Despite
exceptions like Labour’s Alan Johnson
and the Conservatives’ Patrick McLaughlin
(ex-miner) as well as Sajid Javid (son of bus
driver), there is very little in recent decades
to come close to Bevin’s achievement.
The best recent analysis of social
mobility in Britain, The Class Ceiling, by
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, divides
society into three groups of roughly equal
size: Working Class Origins, Intermediate
Origins and Professional and Managerial
Origins. The authors found little evidence
Political Insight December 2020 BU.indd 28Political Insight December 2020 BU.indd 28 10/11/2020 15:4610/11/2020 15:46
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