Rise with your class, not out of it, says well being writer Lisa Fouweather

The concept of social mobility places great emphasis on individual effort - being told that if you work hard then you will earn more money and thus 'climb up' the social ladder.

'You' not 'we', and this is the problem.

In our efforts to move up in society, we neglect our roots, we neglect each other.

You might go to university and land a graduate role that sees you moving out of your small working-class town into a bustling city in which Pret is the new Cooplands, Harrods the new Debenhams, oat milk lattes the new builders brew (i.e., middle-class).

But, what about all the kids who don't 'make it?'

While you're making Oxbridge 'look good', the tokenistic working-class student serving to ease their conscience regarding accusations of being elitist -'Look, we are inclusive! Here is one working-class lesbian girl in this room of 100 upper class cis-het men', what about all the people who are left behind because they couldn't afford to move away?

At the heart of politics should be a determination to improve the lives of working-class people as a class, rather than focusing on ways to somehow rescue a small minority.

The issue with social mobility is this: although a lucky few will move up the social ladder, when they get there, there will still be people in their droves at the bottom, still being looked down upon by those at the top.

That's too individualistic, rather than aiming for individual people to move up the social ladder, we need a collective approach to social mobility.

We should be aiming to abolish the ladder, abolish class divide, altogether, so that we genuinely do all have equal opportunities in life to succeed. So that working hard to succeed is actually based on working hard, not doing the bare minimum because our great grandparents worked hard and because we are born into wealth.

It's not fair that our access to opportunities in life is based, despite what we are told under a capitalist system ('work hard and you will succeed') on what we are born into; on circumstances that all the hard work in the world cannot change, when everything boils down to money.

The biggest source of divide and conflict in society, despite being nothing more than a social construct are bits of paper, numbers on a screen. Money corrupts. Whereby, in our fervent bid to acquire it, we neglect our values (and each other) in the process.

When it comes to our prospects in life, money is very much the 'be all and end all' in terms of determining our access to opportunities:

Our chances of going to university and, in turn, chances of securing a lucrative career.

Our ability to move away/to relocate for work.

Our ability to go travelling and see the world past that of our hometown.

It all boils down to money. If we (or rather, our parents) have it, then great, we can do all of these things and move 'up' in the world. If we don't, well, then we're stuck.

'Stuck' when, in order to access those opportunities, we need money, but in order to acquire money, we need to be able to access those opportunities. Creating a glass ceiling situation whereby we can see everything that's above us, everything that we want, but we're stuck below it, unable to break through the glass.

Money being the hammer that we need in order to smash through the glass, the hammer that we can see but cannot reach, hence why we're stuck.

And this, unfortunately, is what social mobility ultimately all boils down to: how much money we have; whether or not we can 'buy our way out'*of our working-class status.

*(Ironic that we try to buy our way out of the inequalities that money brings with the very source of inequality itself- money; thus only serving to contribute to the upholding of the class divide).

'It's not what you know it's who you know'

When you are already in a privileged space, your access to people who can help you to progress even further in that space is high, hence the concept of 'Nepotism' and 'Nepo Babies'.

When one is born into wealth, their parents connections can (and often do) give their children a 'leg up' in terms of their own careers. An aspiring actor whose father is a respected screenplay writer, for example, will have a far greater chance of being accepted into the top drama schools than someone without the ability to name drop, even if they have less talent, purely because of the connections they have.

Their success therefore not being based on personal hard work, but on their parents hard work. And, the same concept applies to hereditary wealth.

In a society which is anything but meritocratic, where class divide is stark, the line between privilege and poverty unmistakable, it can be concluded, in no uncertain terms, that we are most definitely not born on a 'level playing field.'

In reality, we're born into either wealth, poverty or, for most of us, somewhere in between whereby we're just 'getting by.' Note the phrasing here: 'born into.' The unfortunate fact being that no matter how hard we work, how aspirational we are, who we know counts for everything.

Hence the popularity of the phrase, 'it's not what you know it's who you know', because nothing is more true than this).

If our parents are wealthy, we have a head start in life with the opportunities that money brings (remember that money itself is worthless- nothing but scraps of paper and figures on a screen, it's what we do with that money that informs our wealth).

A family that can afford the fees of private schooling (in the UK the average annual cost to send a child to a private school is £14,940 per school year), will, in doing so, set their child up for massively increased chances of getting into a prestigious university ( 31.4% of students at Oxbridge universities in 2023 were from private schools, despite privately educated students accounting for just 5.9% of school age children in the UK), and thus increase their chances of securing a higher paid profession.

This is in direct contrast to a working-class family where education isn't prioritised, a lack of money seeing instant gratification favouring work over grades.

If your parents are wealthy, you're more likely to go to a private school. If you go to a private school, you're more likely to go to Oxbridge.

If you go to Oxbridge, you're more likely to secure a top paying profession, and thus, when (if) you have kids yourself, the privilege continues, hence why the rich keep getting richer whilst the poor keep getting poorer... A case of 'It's not what you know, it's who you know...'

Based on this then, based on the fact that we're undoubtedly NOT on a level playing field/ that some people are born several steps ahead of other people, how is it fair that we are all competing for the same opportunities? (Disclaimer: it's not).

Where there are two 18 year olds - one from a sh***** comprehensive school in the roughest part of Northern England, one fresh from Eton in London - the privately educated kid is going to have the upper hand every time.

Why? Because the system is based on lesser than and greater than, with the working-class being kept at the very bottom of the ladder while the middle and upper-classes sit at the top.

For the (very small) minority who do move up the ladder from working-class to middle-class, they are brandished as 'proof' that success in life is all about aspiration and hard work, and that anyone can achieve anything they want to achieve based on this.

I believe that this is why, to use Britain's most prestigious universities as an example here, Oxford and Cambridge, accept (a very select few) students from working-class backgrounds (one in 10), and why you will see, in many job ad descriptions, companies encouraging people from minority groups to apply, because it makes them look good/is a token of their 'social consciousness.'

A 'box ticking' diversity exercise, it allows them to point to the one working-class person amongst the 100 middle-class people and keep stringing the working-class along.

'Just keep working in that minimum wage job where you're treated like something on the bottom of someone's shoe, and in a few years you could find yourself here.' (leaving out the part where they reveal that they are in fact more likely to transform into something on the bottom of someone's shoe than they are to move up the social ladder).

The working-class should not go along with these games of tokenism.

Having a few working-class people become lawyers does not counter balance the low pay, poor working conditions, exploitation that working-class people as a whole face.

When someone from a working-class background lands a career which sees them now being perceived as 'middle-class', someone from a mining village becoming a lawyer, for example, we applaud them for having managed to 'escape' and 'make something of themselves', forgetting about all the people who are left behind.

The working-class cleaner in the hospital, without whom, the middle-class doctor would be unable to ensure his patients safety.

The working-class cashier in the supermarket without whom, the middle-class lawyer would be unable to eat (to ensure his survival).

Whilst the working-class turned middle-class lawyer is lauded with respect in the form of money, the working-class cleaners and cashiers who are literally running society, their jobs just as important as the lawyers, are looked down upon, pitied, almost ('almost', but not quite, the low pay and lack of respect proving hard to resurrect).

Asking the cleaners and the cashiers 'what's next', ' 'when are you going to escape?', as though their job isn't one to be taken seriously, but just a stop gap until they magically* come into money that will change their access to opportunities.

*('Magically' because, to reiterate again, in order to access those opportunities, we need money, but in order to acquire money, we need to be able to access those opportunities- stuck under a glass ceiling for which the hammer we need to break through it just isn't there).

Rather than making class something which we need to escape from ('need to' but can't, owing to the glass ceiling and lack of hammer), with working-class jobs being seen as the devils work for which we need to move up and out of them into the middle-classes, we should be making working-class jobs as respectable as middle-class jobs, starting with fair pay.

Only when classism is abolished will we truly be a country for the many, not the few. But, until then, the rich will keep getting richer while the poor will keep getting poorer (and increasingly unhappier).

'Rise with your class, not out of it'

Let's make class something that doesn't need to be 'escaped' from.