Oh Look, Inequality

Alan Milburn’s latest leap into the public spotlight has seen his Panel on Fair Access to the Professions make headlines throughout the press, but is only the latest attempt to keep the New labour flame alive

Media social commentators seem surprised at the facts assembled by the commission, which probably could have been listed by any reasonably aware fourteen year old General studies student. Poor children do worse at school; are more likely to leave at an early age; are less likely to go to onto tertiary education; and are less likely to get into a “top” university.

And after all that, they are unlikely to make it into the closed shop professions where who you know matters more than what you know, and where routes into employment are often through unpaid “internships”, meaning that mummy and daddy have to provide the necessary allowance to live on.

My grand father made the same analysis- from the position that it was what he saw everyday as a miner who left school at 14 around 1920. He had what he thought was the answer. He actually believed that it was the job of a political party, “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their labour and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each service or industry”

So is that the answer given by Milburn, that if you want a fairer, more just society, then the inequalities in that society need to be tackled? Sadly, but not surprisingly, no.

Young people require “opportunity” to experience social mobility. They need role models, they need their aspirations raised, by the creation of more city academies, and where schools are not “performing” by giving parents a voucher to place them elsewhere.

They need careers advice, extra-curricural activity, cadet force activity. Yet again, the root causes of inequality are not to be tackled but better window dressing put in place. Those who have, get to keep it. Talent just needs more encouragement. Society itself is not at fault.

So much analysis, so little understanding, so trot out the new Labour panaceas. They have failed yet again to understand that cosmetic changes have stopped fooling their bedrock support.

Perhaps the most telling comment on the report came from the Tory spokesman. The Tories fully support it.