Today Ed Miliband spoke at the Sutton Trust’s annual conference on social mobility.

I must admit that the politics of social mobility has always left me rather cold. To put it quite bluntly, when a banker or lawyer can earn 100 times more than the person who cleans their office, this situation raises far bigger and more important questions than whether or not both parties achieved their respective positions on “merit”. Such a situation ought to anger any decent and civilized person, regardless of whether both parties had an equal opportunity to rise to the top.

And that is why I was mildly gratified by Ed Miliband’s approach to the whole occassion. Yes he started off with the usual ritual, commending the Sutton Trust for doing such important work (they don’t). But he then proceeded to turn the politics of social mobility, if not on it’s head, then certainly upon it’s side.

I believe in expanding access to higher education.

But the question we must all answer is what happens to those who don’t go to university?

Social mobility must not be just about changing the odds that young people from poor backgrounds will make it to university.

That really matters.

But we also have to improve opportunities for everyone, including those who don’t go to university

We must reject the snobbery that says the only route to social mobility runs through University.

As if only one kind of pathway to success matters.

In Germany, middle-class parents boast about their kids doing great apprenticeships.

In Britain, too often people think that if they don’t go to university, they are written off by society.

We must have a better offer to those young people.

In other words, offering opportunities to all who possess the “right” academic abilities is simply not good enough. People who may not be cut out to be financiers or management consultants are citizens too.

Yet, right now, Britain’s lopsided economy is structured in such a way as to reward a very narrow range of skills and abilities. And this, I’m afraid, bring’s us to the limitations of Miliband’s speech. The problem, Ed said, was one of “snobbery”. In Germany, he noted, middle class parents are proud to see their children go down skilled vocational routes. And the solution he offered was far greater investment in education.

Yet the narrow range of opportunities that exist in Britain today cannot simply be understood as cultural malady – that is to say, to a problem of “snobbery”. Nor can the problem be solved through greater investment in education.

At route, this is a problem of trade, deindustrialisation, and over-specialisation. It is all well to invest in training highly skilled engineers. Yet the capacity of such engineers to benefit for their skills will be limited so long as the economy remains so heavily centred around financial services. Today, a man or woman can be very skilled at, say, building trains. And yet, in the current order of things, they may find it easier to find work offering menial services to highly paid London professionals.

We cannot, therefore, even think about how we are properly going to broaden out opportunity without finding ways to broaden out the base of the economy. To do so will necessitate a serious revision of the way in which the economy is governed. The allocation of scarce investment funds cannot be left to the market. The government must take an active role in nurturing, and yes even creating, those industries that we want to see.

And yes, we must be willing to consider protection, if not on a British level, then certainly on a pan-European level. We cannot deny people the ability to put their vocational skills into practice simply because somebody half way across the world is willing to do their work for a tenth of their wages. (And this, incidently, is why the upcoming Euro-Indian Free Trade Agreement will move us in exactly the wrong direction).

So yes, props to Ed for challenging the narrowly concieved politics of social mobility, and for asserting that fairness is about more than rewarding a narrow range of academic abilities, irrespective of background. Now, however, he needs to come up with a bold economic plan that is capable of supporting his social and moral vision.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Dear Judges,

In 1748, the Baron of Montesquieu singled out the English political system as an exemplary form of protection of liberties, and the avoidance of corruption and despotism. He described in The Spirit of the Laws the separation between what we would now call the legislative, judiciary and executive powers.

His argument was extremely simple: that by any combination of these powers, the liberty of the subject would immediately be made null, because liberty depends on a stability of mind, and a predictability of outcome. This stability, he argues, is present when the branches are separate. However:

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

“Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”

Now, perhaps it’s sometime since you last learned of the political system – so let’s recap. In England currently, the three branches are represented as follows: the legislative power is made through the Houses of Parliament (mainly in Acts of Parliament). The executive force is the civil service (including the police). The Judiciary – now, that would be you.

However, the current actions of the legislative government has been to ‘advise’ the judiciary so strongly, as to essentially bring a conjunction between the legislative and judiciary powers. This means that “the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control.” Further, Montesquieu adds this:

“The judges ought likewise to be of the same rank as the accused, or, in other words, his peers; to the end that he may not imagine he is fallen into the hands of persons inclined to treat him with rigour.”

For the last week, the courts have been overflowing not only with adminstrative paper work, but with class conflict. The rich are judging the poor, the privileged the disenfranchised, the powerful the weak. Those who have been scared and frightened by the rioting of the angry are now sitting in judgement and meting out punishment on those who frightened them. This is the source, surely, of the willingness to impose sentences of 6 months as a minimum for shop-lifting, for handling stolen goods worth an insignificant amount, and for the refusal of bail even in the most demanding of circumstances for the accused.

I am no great believer in the means of Liberalism, but I imagine many judges are. If the judiciary continues to be complicit in this new regime, then there is no liberty. I lay down the challenge for a judge to step forward and denounce what is occurring in the courts as I write.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has just provided yet more evidence that he is, in fact, an odious little shit. In a speech to a union conference, he warned that if widespread public sector strikes take place (which seems likely), the government would enact new anti-strike legislation. This is part of the speech obtained by the Guardian before the conference:

“We are undoubtedly entering a difficult period. Cool heads will be required all round. Despite occasional blips, I know that strike levels remain historically low, especially in the private sector. On that basis, and assuming this pattern continues, the case for changing strike law is not compelling,”

“However, should the position change, and should strikes impose serious damage to our economic and social fabric, the pressure on us to act would ratchet up. That is something which both you, and certainly I, would wish to avoid.” (Here: http://bit.ly/jecJFc).

What’s really amazing about this rubbish is the fact that this is regarded a fantastically clever move by the Business Secretary at this tense moment in negotiations. From the Guardian, again:

A business department source insisted that Cable was issuing a “subtle” message to the unions. “We hope the unions will see this as quite comforting that the secretary of state says there is no case at the moment. But at the same time if circumstances change, the government’s position will change,” the source said.

This is the language of the mafia thug. (“Nice labour movement you got here. Shame if something happened to it…”)

If the government cared, actually gave a shit, about avoiding recession and saving thousands from destitution, the message to the unions would be very different.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the economy cannot recovery properly without a policy of wealth redistribution. Increasing inequality and stagnating wages have destroyed real affluence in this country, and it’s hard to see how effective demand will be able to recover when what little wealth the country now produces goes increasingly to the top of the income scale, where it sits and does nothing. The unions are the force in society best suited to tackle this. On the economic front, stronger collective bargaining power will ensure that the benefits of economic growth are enjoyed more widely, increasing the spending power of ordinary people; on the political side, the unions can articulate an alternative to austerity economics(something Labour has failed to do).

The UK needs more strikes: they’re good for the economy.

In maybe the most offensive manifestation of the Daily Telegraph‘s slide from serious paper of record to hate-filled propaganda rag for the literate over-80s, their personal finance editor, Ian Cowie, brings us the following suggestion to improve Britain’s democracy:

 …here’s an idea that might really stir up some interest – and improve our nation’s governance.Why don’t we restrict votes to people who actually pay something into the system? No, I am not suggesting a return to property-based eligibility [oh no, that would be indecent]; although that system worked quite well when Parliament administered not just Britain but most of the world [oh, the good old days...]. Today, income would be a much better test, setting the bar as low as possible; perhaps including everyone who pays at least £100 of income tax each year.

[...]

This modest proposal [unfortunate choice of words, there] would, however, exclude large numbers of people who have no ‘skin in the game’ and who may even comprise the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today [*cough* Labour voters *cough*]. Their contribution is not just negative in financial terms – they take out more than they put in – but likely to be damaging to the decisions taken by democracies.

[If you have the stomach for it, you can read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/iHVEZF]

I was planning to fisk this pathetic little screed (including his embarrassing pub analogy), but there’s really no need with an argument so riddled with flaws and lacking in human empathy. I’d rather focus on what it says about the standard of public discourse in this country that such a suggestion – literally disenfranchising the poorest in society – is endorsed by a quality newspaper.

We’ve already seen the proposal by DWP minister Iain Duncan-Smith (who manages to be both profoundly boring and evil) that the long term unemployed be forced to clean the streets in high-vis jackets for £2 an hour (http://bit.ly/aXLdpM), which resulted in relatively little outcry. Once it becomes acceptable to force the unemployed into the kind of menial labour more commonly used as punishment for criminals, why not take away their political rights as well? Is that really such a leap?

This also illustrates something about the right wing press in this country: namely their monopoly on lunacy, paranoia and sheer fucking hatefulness. This was the subject of a very good piece by Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy (here: http://bit.ly/gZNQmJ) a while back concerning the columnists Simon Heffer and Melanie Philips and their opinion of the Soviet/Marxist credentials of the current government (really). He concluded, quite righly:

No serious left of centre publication – not even any low circulation Trot rag, come to that – would make space available to the broadly equivalent contention that Ed Miliband is some form of fascist.

‘Looney Left’, indeed.

We seem to be setting a standard nowadays for justifying injustice and dehumanising the poor. In the aftermath of the expenses scandal, there’s been much talk by various groups of ‘cleaning up British politics’. I suggest that addressing this would be a good place to start.

We can’t in all honesty, remember if one met Kate Middleton at St Andrews. We may well have – St Andrews is a small place, without any appreciable nightlife beyond the two streets where the students cluster. With the weather so consistently bleak only alcohol could really induce us to travel outside. And so to ward off cabin fever – we partied. More or less continuously. We partied with high and low. With the Ras (in St Andrew Yahs) in their pink rugby shirts and pink pashminas and orange permatans, and with the strange Scottish children, some of them just 17, from the yet further North, who took term times jobs on the counter at Tesco and Morrisons, and melted their teeth with Irn Bru and other industrial lubricants. Both high and low could knock it back, but to our middling ear, neither spoke comprehensibly even when sober. In St Andrews, at some point, one meets everyone.

Such heady days, those earliy noughties. St Andrews – famous suddenly for something other than the world’s second most boring sport – was for us a veritable student paradise thanks to booze day Tuesdays, post 9/11 optimism (finally now we can go out and fix the world!) pathetic academic workloads and seemingly endless credit – Wowzer! Wonga! Did we spend money! Even the poor students – who though they may never have bought drinks at the balls (preferring to limber up with three litres of White Lightening to one of White Label Gin) still splashed a hundred pounds on a ticket. £100 to go to the ball! For an opportunity to get drunk in slightly more uncomfortable clothes than one usually wore! And if we were really lucky we might grope a stranger to the warble of Franz Ferdinand or the Proclaimers – although more frequently we’d find ourselves in the St John’s tent holding someone’s hair out of their eyes – feeling temporarily saintly and therefore fully licensed to stare down the bewildered cleavage of inebriated women, cheeks blanched with tears and shiny as toffee apples. They counted their breaths like nervous divers, and we counted with them. Oh to be young again and vomiting!

The Yahs are all gone now, moved on, moved up, uP, UP … into PR mainly, corporate finance, the London nightclub scene. Meanwhile our middleclass cohort are all broke. Modestly – though it feels massive and irreparable – none of us have paid back even half our student loans yet (at any rate none who haven’t inherited). Scarcely any of us own houses or are married. We still live like students. We still are students, some of us. And so you will know us by the flecks of vitriol we unconsciously spill on Friday, at the helicopters and ermine and the thought of two week honeymoons to places beyond the range Ryan Air and Easy Jet.

And the poor students, the ones with whom we played Mega Drive and shared slabs of cardboard pizza? They all work for pharmaceutical giants, or government. They refuse to find us better jobs. We let them buy the first round.

*

Kate Middleton – we have a vague memory of a woman with a face as bright as a carton of Sunny D, eyebrows plucked into a low interrupted frown line, tiny pupils that stared straight through you to some point fifteen years in the future – to cashmere baby jumpsuits, to champions league competitive parenting, to whatever it is the rich want… more money I suppose. Was that her? It could have been any of them. So probably not.

William we knew, very slightly. A natural stooper, a polite brayer. Only occasionally a man with the punchdrunk air that comes with knowing the wrong word or phrase will detonate beneath him, a home-grown semantic IED. There are worse jobs than princing but even so, it must be a pain: required to be so constantly on guard, so ostentatiously dull. And our William – though apparently fabulously incurious about the world, and without a reported opinion on anything at all – has at least the gift of picking his friends carefully. None have embarrassed him in word or deed yet. More evidence required? He didn’t pick us. And he knows our name – so where’s our invite?

Cancel the Royal Wedding! Use the money to pay off my student debt! Our advice to students going to St Andrews next year – get their early – Tesco Express only has four counters and three shifts.

Do the Windlettons speak for our generation? No, clearly not – not when for all the hair lost, neither appear to evolve. But maybe they speak for our past, our silent acquiescent optimism – for a time before Abu Ghraib and Bear Stearns, Madeline McCann and Joseph Fritzl, Raoul Moat and Compare the Meerkat, the Tea Party and Susan Boyle – for a time, as the poet, wrote when living seemed a laugh, and love – all it was said to be.

Enough of the ‘we’.

*

The question is – will you be watching the wedding? I will be. Partly because I am sucker for kitsch, and for love – or for at least trying to spot its symptoms in others.

But I’ll also be watching with the same queasy, morbid, hungry fascination I have for the first corner of a Grand Prix or the first fence of the National. For the error, the crash, the pile up – from the mild gaff to full blown catastrophe.

The goofs most of us can enjoy – a chance to snort like from the Olympian vantage of our anonymity. The more complex the event, the more that can go wrong. Does the Archbishop of Canterbury do many weddings these days? What if he forgets his lines? Will Charles trip on Kate’s dress? Will Prince Andrew fart on camera? Will Edward pass out with sunstroke? Or at the altar, will Kate change her mind and say no? Will Will? Will a corgi do a Paula Radcliffe in the aisle? Will Harry object because he’s been secretly porking his brother’s bird? Will it be as good as the marriage of Brad and Beth in Neighbours when Brad had slept with Lauren, and she was pregnant with Brad 2.0 and no-one knew but Lou, until on the big day Beth sensed it and Brad broke down and Lauren cried and the credits ran?

But also I will be watching, coiled with a child’s clenched awe, for something much, much worse. For some hideous terrorist atrocity – sudden overwhelming violence, crowds panicking, gunfire, explosions, a ruby spray of blood on the virgin white dress, the confetti of ‘organic shrapnel’. Watching for a grenade bouncing off Charles’ conk like a beach ball, and the Queen combusting – a swollen pensioner leg torpidly wafting over the screen – to where the archbishop consumed in flames lift his skirt to reveal his satyr legs, and Philip bursts from his human disguise into his full immortal lizard glory.

And though I’ll be laid out before the telly with my snacks and CocaCola mainly for the kitsch – I also secretly want an invite to the chill banquet of shock and disgust and helplessness and compassion and heartbreak, everything about an act of atrocity you can share with your in-laws – along with the unacknowledged excitement and sudden clarity of living through the end of days, the freightload of unearned grandeur – of glamour even – that comes of being a witness to Big History. The wedding alone, just doesn’t cut it. This is TV in the 21 century. So my gift to the happy couple? A prayer they’ll make it out alive, that my own secret sick desire won’t come to pass.

After all, there’s always the Olympics next year.

“There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading…To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.” – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

This story should have got much more attention than it did:

Researchers at Australian National University have found that positions with low security, high demands, and imbalanced effort-reward ratios cause more mental distress than unemployment. Over seven years, the researchers followed 7,000 respondents in an Australian labor survey. People who moved from no employment to jobs of “high psychosocial quality” showed gains in mental health. But those who went from jobless to employed in thankless, unstable positions were found to be more depressed and anxious than those who never got hired at all.

The authors of the study conclude (a bit mildly) that their ”results suggest that employment strategies seeking to promote positive outcomes for unemployed individuals need to also take account of job design and workplace policy.”

Anyone who has studied some economic theory knows the long list of costs associated with unemployment (including the often dramatic psychological costs). Hence the general view that work is better than worklessness. But when was the last time somebody brought up the issue of the psychological costs of work in a discussion on benefits and unemployment? (Clearly the sorts of people on the dole for a great length of time are not very likely to ever have jobs of a “high psychosocial quality”.)

For the necessary dirty work to be carried out, our economic system requires a permanent underclass of underpaid, overworked and under-appreciated human beings, for whom the mind-bending boredom and squalor of long term unemployment would actually be an improvement in their lives. (This is often the kind of work, remember, that stops the sewers overflowing and keeps our rubbish from piling up and rotting in the sun.)

Findings like these should provide an opportunity to openly and frankly discuss capitalism’s sheer fucking barbarity. Maybe we could decide that our current division of labour needs to be replaced with something more humane; we could defend the rights of individuals to abstain from jobs that will do incredible damage to their long-term health (maybe we could even decide that such people should not be denounced as ‘scroungers’ for doing so).

I’m not holding my breath.

The International Monetary Fund has released a paper entitled Inequality, Leverage and Crisis making the case that inequality was an ‘underlying cause of the Great Recession of 2008-2009′, The Telegraph reports:

“Global unemployment remains at record highs, with widening income inequality adding to social strains,” he [IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn] said, citing turmoil in North Africa as a prelude to what may happen as 400m youths join the workforce over the next decade. “We could see rising social and political instability within nations – even war,” he said. [my emphasis]

I doubt the IMF has taken a drastic leftward turn (as this article suggests, it is subtley backing Washington’s position on the emerging ‘currency war’ between the US and China, and it has come out against any form of capital controls). Still, paragraphs like this are startling:

The paper, by the Fund’s modelling unit, warned of “disastrous consequences” for the world economy unless workers regain their “bargaining power” against rentiers. It suggests radical changes to the tax system and debt relief for workers.

During the current crisis the IMF has found time from its busy schedule of structurally readjusting the living shit out of third world countries to give some decent advice to the world’s policymakers. Last year it released a paper arguing that one of the best ways to boost global demand would be to increase wages as a proportion of national income (thus ending a decades-long trend of wage stagnation in countries like Britain and the US). It has also warned countries of the dangers of public spending cuts. (See the brilliant Duncan of ‘Duncan’s Economic Blog’ for more: http://bit.ly/gAzOEH).

The fact that the countries currently up in flames are all vastly unequal (intuitively something likely to encourage civil strife) hasn’t been pointed out much recently. These revolts aren’t just pro-democracy, they’re also against the parasitic elites who enjoy stunning opulence while hundreds of thousands live and die well below the poverty line. Hopefully with pronouncements like this coming from the IMF this might become a talking point.

The growth of inequality in recent decades seems to be at breaking point. A few months ago I wrote about some research showing that increasing inequality isn’t even making the rich feel better off (quite the opposite), and multi-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have even offered to pay more taxes to deal with the US’s deficit crisis. Without the veneer of increasing consumption and cheap credit to distract us (and with spending cuts for the many coupled with tax cuts for the few on the way), the vast inequalities developed over the decades are now almost offensively obvious.

Sam Harris on the Huffington Post recently commented: “We now live in a country [the US] in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure?” I feel we may be reaching that limit (and we now know to ask how such inequality can be endured by people much less than free.)

“There’s always a bigger fish.” – Qui-Gon Jinn

Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog notes a symptom of just how far the West has regressed in the distribution of income: so much of America’s wealth is concentrated in the top 1% of the income scale that those only just below actually feel insecure about their standing. The differences in income among the rich are now so dramatic that Americans in something like the top 10% of earners confidently call themselves ‘middle’ or ‘upper middle’ class. (Read it here: http://nyti.ms/iiA7cV.)

As Catherine Rampell (also of the NYT) explains: ”those who aspire to hop from the 30th percentile to the 35th percentile would need to increase their cash income by $4,000 annually (or by about 17 percent); those who aspire to hop from the 94th percentile to the 99th percentile would require an increase of $324,900 (or 171 percent)…In other words, at least in dollar terms, there is much greater inequality at the very top of the income scale than at the bottom or in the middle.” Put another way, the differences in income between neighbours in a ‘gated community’ are greater than those between people in an actual community. A businessman on several hundred thousand a year can pull back the curtains, scowl at the couple across the street and quite sincerely mutter, “This is bullshit, why don’t I have a jet?”

All this shows that ‘wealth’ is, indeed, relative and psychological. The Thatcherite justification for greater inequality was that the working class was better off in absolute terms. This is barely a sufficient excuse once we realise that people judge their social standing next to their neighbour’s.

The same can only hold true in Britain, a country that has followed America’s example in inequality (we’re now on the way to regaining the distribution of income of c. 1920). Is it any wonder our ‘Business Leaders’ desperately set up ficticious establishments in Monaco and threaten to jump ship if the top rate of tax is increased 1%? (The poor devils, I know…)

So, ever-increasing inequality – the objective of politics in the West for 30 years now – doesn’t even make the rich happy. All this social dislocation, insecurity and resentment is for the benefit only of the super-super rich, who have no social betters (all of whom could probably fit in a medium-sized school assembly hall). Is that what a democracy looks like?

Scene in Twickenham train station: well dressed woman in mid-thirties shouting at gigantic pink railway employee through three inches of Perspex. Woman’s daughter has phoned mother in tears after being fined for travelling on the wrong ticket.

Woman: You people have no idea customer service, you just sit there you fat lump

Railway employee: I’m sorry if you’d like to fill in a complaint form-

Woman: What you do is just unacceptable. Where I work, in my company, if you were as an inefficient and careless you’d be out! You’d be gone! You can’t treat people – you can’t treat customers – the way you do!

Railway employee: I’m very sorry if you’d like to fill in a complaint form-

Woman: You’re lazy and inefficient and you’re stupid and my daughter phones up in floods of tears. I work in a private business, where I work you can’t do that. You have no idea how to run things.

Railway employee: I’m sorry it seems we have actually run out of complaint forms but if you leave your phone and number and address, customer services-

Woman (now screaming): You know there’s a Tory Government in now – and there are going to be cuts, big cuts and lazy, stupid, useless people like you are going to be sacked and it’s going to be a good thing too.

Woman storms out. Blob behind the Perspex, probably bullied from around the age of five, remains polite, vaguely consolatory, but essentially as placid as scoop of ice cream. Then scratches nose.

Quick cluster of thoughts:

1.) In spite of 2008 banking crisis myth endures that all private companies are ‘de facto’ more efficient and better run than public companies.

2.) However train company’s efficiency in catching daughter trying to travel on cheaper ticket – not acknowledged or credited.

3.) Woman in efficient business – apparently not working over xmas – unlike man she is shouting out.

4.) South West trains are of course a private company – and have been ever since 1994 – although of course like the banks the rail network is too big to fail (you can’t just abandon it) and consequently is being subsidised to the tune of £5 billion per year (how much taxpayers money ends up at South West trains though, I don’t know). She’s right of course trains in the UK are shit, and always haven been, but a decade and half of semi-private management has only made them worse.

5.) Train companies have just been given the green light to increase fares by up to 11% not all of which has to be reinvested in the services. So now is probably a good time to buy rail company shares.

6.) Middle class woman’s rant probably has less to do with train company inefficiency than with her daughter’s humiliation by ticket inspecting prole.

In summary scene illustrates the underlying reasons why I so dislike modern Tories; for however much window-dressing Hayekian theories about the delusions of state planning, or else the oleaginous smugness of the virtues of ‘practical common sense’, or the barmy paranoia of how they just ‘want their families to be left alone by the state’ – is a screaming, ignorant lunatic who will quite happily walk a mile to pick a pointless fight with a complete stranger.

And on that merry note – happy New Year everyone!

Last night Nick Clegg gave the annual Hugo Young lecture at the Guardian offices, and in doing so set out his vision of a just society. In his speech – a version of which was published on Comment is Free – he  sought to present the Liberal Democrats as the “new progressives”, in contrast to the “old progressives” of Labour and the left.

His starting point, that statism does necessarily equate to social progress, is not something with which I would disagree. Yet his fundamental approach to creating the Good Society is neither “new” nor “progressive. Fundamentally Clegg argues that meritocracy rather than equality is central to social justice. “Social mobility”, he says, “is what characterises a fair society, rather than a particular level of income equality”. Inequality, meanwhile, merely becomes unjust when it is “fixed; passed on, generation to generation”.

It is perhaps idle to argue about whether such views can be deemed progressive, considering how elastic the term has become. Yet one thing is for certain: his ideas are not new. It is, after all, more than three decades since Margaret Thatcher told us: “The pursuit of equality is itself a mirage. Let our children grow tall, and let some grow taller than others if they have it in them to do so.” To be fair to Clegg he probably believes in greater positive effort to enhance opportunities than Thatcher. Yet his basic premise – that serious inequality is fine as long as it is  ”earned” – is the same. To present this reheated equal-ops Toryism as the politics of “new progressivism” strikes me as either disingenuous or politically ignorant.

Enhancing opportunities and promoting social mobility may, to some, be laudable goals. Yet they are not weapons against poverty and social exclusion, at least  from the perspective of society at large. As Dave Semple put it, in response to Iain Duncan Smith’s suggestion that education rather than money was the best way to tackle poverty, “even if everyone who could work had a degree, we’d simply have the best educated workforce of shop assistants and bus drivers in the world.”

The point is that however mobile a society is, many must, under the present order of things, end up at the bottom of the pile. And as things stand, this means low wages, and a particularly great exposure to the cycles of unemployment that have proved an irreducible feature of free market economies. What is Nick’s agenda for those who, for whatever reason, end up at this station in life? What is his agenda for the millions of 40 or 50 year olds who won’t benefit from the pupil premium? He does not enlighten us on such things.

Clegg also critiques the left’s focus on income inequality on the grounds that that “it pays insufficient attention to the non-financial dimensions of poverty.” “Of course” he says “it is better to have more money, even if only a little more. But poverty is also about the quality of the local school, access to good health services and the fear of crime.” And it is on these grounds he defends the comprehensive spending review in the face of findings by the Institute of Fiscal Studies that it hit the poor hardest”

The government’s own analysis, which did include [public] services, showed a different picture [from that show by the Institute of Fiscal Studies], one which showed the richest fifth losing the most from the spending review and the poorest fifth losing less. The government’s decisions to protect NHS funding, increase schools funding and provide additional early-years provision all channel resources towards the poorest.

Regardless of anything else, such an approach in fact astoundingly illiberal in the real sense of the term. Clegg essentially presents access to public services as interchangeable with cash income, when considering the impact of his and Cameron’s budget, as though the former were a perfect substitute for the latter. The point, however, is that in this society, cash is special: It does not merely contribute to somebody’s material well being but confers a crucial degree of autonomy upon the individual, enabling them to excersise a bit of control over their day to day existence. Somebody trying to live on £200 a week in London will lack such autonomy, even if they enjoy access to a good library and hospital, and their neighbourhood is well policed.

Nick Clegg, quite clearly, is seeking to fundamentally reposition the Lib Dems some distance away from the party that was formed by an alliance of Liberals and Social Democrats. Yet as long as Cameron remains at the head of the Conservatives, Clegg’s brand of centre-right liberalism will be competing in a very congested market place. Unfortunately for Clegg, his vacuous references to a “new progressivism” – a term already panned on the Liberal blogosphere – will, I believe, prove wholly insufficient to carve out something different.