Big up Alan Milburn

[sincitylover]

About time someone flagged up the major inequalities in the professions and hopefully will actually do something about it!

i am a bit yes and no about this.
a. the statistics seem fairly wild so i think they are suspect
b. rich folk have advantages - duh!

other than that yes well done alan - not too sure what 'big up alan' actually means other than sounding rude.

should have put it in inverted commas!!

It means give him a round of applause. I realise that it's hardly a revelation but it would be nice to think that bright kids whatever their background could have fair access to the professions.

I work in an area linked to law and it is uniformly depressing to see that the vast majority of people employed are out of a mould.

I suppose I can relate alot of my experience to it - as a poor child sent on a scholarship to a 'posh' school.

thread about this yesterday, britain and the us have the biggest social mobility gap. it sucks something needs to be done!!!!

I am not going to big him up, because he told the BBC: "We have raised the glass ceiling but I don't think we have broken through it yet." here
Raised the glass ceiling.... like f*ck they have.
All the evidence points to social mobility having got WORSE under Labour.
I welcome the report but if they are not prepared to start from a position of honesty about it then I find it pretty unlikely they're going to find a solution.

the one thing that could be done is remove uni fees.

IMO Labour have made these inequalities worse not better.

In my day (showing my age now) if you were bright and passed the relevant exams you could go to uni without having to pay tuition fees. There was also a grant - although that was being phased out at the time. You did not have to worry about bankrupting your family.

I agree they are not really socialists by any stretch of the imagination. M Thatcher also had alot to answer for imo.

But I still think it's good that he has produced a report which has flagged it up - whether or not anything happens remains to be seen.

It is good and it is right that he has flagged this up but it does make him look rather foolish as most people already knew it (wonders what planet he has been living on for the last 30 or so years....).

Tomorrow, Alan will be reporting on the open-air toilet habits of bears and the suspected continuing religion of His Holiness the Pope.

TheCrackFox - i am curious did you want a socialist govt that was more radical about addressing inequalities or are you saying that Labour made it worse than if the Conservatives were in power. Just curious.

I agree with TheCrackFox it is a shame on the Labour Govt to allow social inequality to increase and social mobility to fall.

Frankly, we need free Grammar schools and good quality free apprenticeships back so kids from poor backgrounds get a chance.
I really honestly though the Blair Govt would address soe of the inequalities that grew under Thatcher/Major but they just got worse!

TDiddy - I doubt a Tory Govt would have been worse on this issue but I hope Ian Duncan Smith's excellent work on this issue and welfare reform will be acted upon.

I was cheered to hear about this report (although still have not made time to read it ) - it's just good to know that the govt is actually addressing this stuff. But too little, too late, like so much else (eg Ed Miliband's climate change announcement a few days ago - great, but should have happened ten years ago).

A big part of me thinks - a report like this wouldn't have happened/won't happen under the Tories, because Tories aren't concerned about equality (as a rule).

Does the skewing of the tax regime by Labour in favour of the less well off not relevant?

Is all the action on child poverty (admittedly not perfect) invalid?

Are fairly confident that the Tories would have done this.

The question I have is whether the British public has the stomach for radical redistribution- that is what it would take to REDUCE inequality in boom years. And we have just had as big a boom as we have seen.

I think much deeper thought is needed in the analysis of inequality. is it absulte or relative poverty that we are concerned about? I sometime marvel at the shallowness of this sort of sound bite politics.

Policy and Unquiet- you are both having rave reviews on the thread about popular/good MNers. Your notable absence from that thread only adds to your mystique

Does Is the skewing...

Thanks TDiddy, I hadn't realised one of those threads was running!

I don't think that Labour's record on child poverty counts for nothing (although their tax agenda, such as it was, was completely scuppered by the 10 per cent rate abolition).

policy- though the 10pc rate abolition was a REAL mess, the overall impact of that change is now very minimal. And everything else done on making the less well off pay a smaller proportion of the tax take did favour the them...but agree that it did cost them political capital.

The challenge for economically liberal countries such as the US and Britain is how do you redistribute. The public cries out about inequality but try using the tax instrument to tax and then provide essential services and you will hear the cries....

...there was an interesting programme on R4 last year about why politicians can't tell the public the truth.

That said Obama is, to some extent, disproving this theory