Richard Exell

Today the Government published their New Opportunities white paper, on social mobility. As my colleague Nicola has pointed out in her excellent entry, social mobility and promoting greater equality are not alternatives – international evidence put together by the OECD clearly suggests that “although no consensus exists on this issue, there seems to be a relation between cross-section income inequality and intergenerational earnings mobility. To promote equality of opportunity might then require reducing current income inequality.”

In this post, I want to concentrate on the politics of social mobility. There is a risk that promoting mobility could undermine support for equality as an objective for our society; that is what seems to have happened in America.

But I do not think that is the Government’s plan. I want to look at how the Government has approached mobility by looking at some of the thinking Alan Milburn, the most interesting politician to take social mobility as his theme.

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Nicola Smith

All of the international evidence shows that enabling social mobility is contingent upon reducing inequality. Where the rich and the poor are more equal, the advantages conferred by wealth are less and the barriers to progression are reduced. To quote the OECD, most recently in November of last year:

Countries with more equal incomes…tend also to have greater differences in earnings between fathers and sons: Denmark, Finland and Norway. Conversely, there is less earnings mobility between generations in countries where income inequality is higher: Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.

But today’s 108 page White Paper on social mobility ignores these findings. It only refers to class inequality twice, makes no reference to its central role preventing mobility and proposes a strategy based upon improving public services. While these proposals may lead to a range of helpful new funding streams, this spending will come at the cost of an honest debate about the economic and political choices which continue to support a status quo where inequality and unequal chances are inevitable.

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• LabourList
  The new 'official' Labour salon blog with Peter Mandelson arguing for pluralism – not quite reciprocated by all the trolls.

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Nigel Stanley

Understandably people dependent on investment income to maintain their living standards are not too happy about interest rates getting lower each time the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee meets. It was no doubt this that led to the Conservative proposals to cut tax on savings. Although we rubbished that idea here there clearly are some people who are suffering.

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• More than five million people are working unpaid overtime in the UK
  Unpaid overtime working is now up to a record value of £26.9bn annually, taking the TUC's Work Your Proper Hours Day 2009 up to 27 February. Fear of job loss in the downturn is contributing to this increase, but it may be putting staff health and productivity at risk.
  (tags: workyourproperhoursday long_hours unpaid_overtime)
• How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing (code culture)
  Ivan Krstić with an account of shorters squeezed and fortunes made and lost at Porsche and Volkswagen.
  (tags: porsche shortselling shorting volkswagen stock_market)

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Owen Tudor

Jagdish Bhagwati, university professor, economics and law, at Columbia University in the USA, has started to froth at the mouth (in the Financial Times) about a secret plot he’s discovered by trade unions to end world trade as we know it. Apparently many of President Elect Obama’s people are in on it. And for all I know, he thinks the Bolsheviks and the Martians are too. So let’s set the record straight yet again (it won’t be the last time). Unions support free trade, and wanting that trade to be fair, and just, is not a secret plot, it’s as open and honest as we can get (I often demonstrate the commitment of UK unions to globalisation – if not some of its effects – by pointing out that our largest union, Unite, once spent an entire year campaigning for a Chinese company to take over Britain’s last domestically-owned volume car manufacturer, Rover, precisely because that would keep the factory open and some people in jobs – the very antithesis of protectionism).

We mean what we say – we want trade competition to be based on skills, quality, efficiency and, yes, different wage levels as long as they persist. But we don’t want it based on slavery, child labour, sexual or racial harassment or the repression of free trade unionism. Apparently, those things are ok with Professor Bhagwati – they’re just ‘competitive advantage’.

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Owen Tudor

In the last couple of days, Alistair Darling has issued a letter to fellow G20 chancellors setting out his agenda for the G20′s work over the next three months. It’s rather technical (but necessary) stuff about regulation of the finance sector and ensuring its viability, and there’s nothing much wrong with that. But will it set the pulses racing, and more importantly, will it be enough? No. And his fellow socialist Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, explains why in the Financial Times.

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Adam Lent

I have my own views on the existence of God debate and this is certainly not the place to air them.  But as Nick Spencer points out there could hardly be a worse time to launch a campaign with the slogan “Stop worrying and enjoy your life”?  The organiser of the campaign said:

“You wait ages for an atheist bus and then 800 come along at once. I hope they’ll brighten people’s days and make them smile on their way to work.”

The fact that they are on their way to work at all should be enough to brighten people’s days in the current circumstances!

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Adam Lent

I mentioned before how pressure for a freezing of the minimum wage has grown in recent days.  Here’s four reasons why this is a bad idea.

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Owen Tudor

Although David Cameron launched it, I assume George Osborne must have at least agreed the latest Conservative plan - to incentivise saving with tax relief paid for by cutting (unspecified) public spending. And I’m very disappointed, because George and I went to the same school and the same university (albeit he’s a bit younger than  me) so we probably took the same economics courses, and maybe even had the same teachers. Apparently, I needn’t have bothered listening to them – clearly George didn’t, and he’s now the Shadow Chancellor!

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