Social mobility: Is it a myth?, asks well being writer Lisa Fouweather

Do you go from working-class to middle-class overnight?

And, likewise, if you’re middle-class, the founder of a multi-million pound business that goes into insolvency, leaving you bankrupt/forcing you onto the streets, do you become working-class?

Do you go from middle-class to working-class overnight?

In other words: Is class solely based on money, or does it run deeper than that?

Consider someone from a working-class family who finds themselves caught up in a world of drug dealing.

Their friends are all working-class, as are their parents, but they have accumulated money.

With several houses, they are living a stereotypically ‘middle-class’ lifestyle. Are they?

With different values being attached to different classes - attitudes, priorities, in some cases, morals – the fact is that coming into (or falling out of) money, cannot change what we have spent the entirety of our lives being socialised into being.

I could marry into wealth, but would that take me away from my working-class roots and see me labelling myself as middle-class?

No.

For when I am a Northerner, Doncaster born ‘n bred, when my Grandad worked down the pit, when I am a first-generation university student, when I am working-class, from the accent to the opportunities to, well, pretty much every facet of my life, suddenly becoming rich, whether through myself or someone else, wouldn’t take any of this away.

I would still have all the same experiences etched into my psyche of the state comprehensive school in Doncaster, rated ‘inadequate’ by OFSTED several years running and the tales I heard my Grandad tell of the 80s — the miners strikes which, as a pit worker, put my Mum’s family on the breadline. All of these things would still exist.

Where our class is concerned, is our fate sealed/predetermined by the family within which we are born?

While it’s true that we can rewrite the future, as believers of social mobility would say, ‘we can all climb the social mobility ladder and change our lives’; when we are unable to rewrite the past, when the way in which we were socialised/the class within which we were born is unchangeable, to what extent, and to what effect, can we truly ‘rewrite the future?’

Social mobility is based on the narrowminded view that ‘if you work hard and apply yourself, you can achieve great things’, but fails to take into account all of the disadvantages of the British social class system, where people are defined by the class they were born into rather than by their achievements.

Consider private schools, for example.

Where private school admissions are based on parental wealth, (only those of us who are born into wealth will have the luxury of private schooling afforded to us), how can we say that we live in a meritocratic democracy? How can we say that we all have an equal footing when it comes to acquiring capital, this capital and the acquisition of it being something which goes hand-in-hand with private schooling.

Not just economic capital, but also cultural capital (the social assets of a person: education, style of speech, style of dress, etc), as well as social capital (networks/connections with others: who people know and the status of those people — friends, teachers etc) — ‘it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know’.

‘In my house growing up, we didn’t discuss politics and art around the dinner table, we didn’t even have a dinner table, trays on knees sat on the settee in front of the telly, Emmerdale omnibus- as good as it gets...’

Money equals wealth, not class

Unlike our economic capital which can increase or decrease depending on factors like our job, our cultural and social capital will remain largely unchanged throughout our lives.

Why? Because, ultimately, social class starts with upbringing. Whereas we can change our income based on how much we earn, we cannot change our upbringing. Hence, the argument for social mobility can be seen as being a myth, because when our primary socialisation is what gives us cultural and social capital, if we are born into a working-class family, no matter how much wealth we acquire throughout our life we will arguably remain working-class.

‘Working-class and wealthy’ is a juxtaposition when we have been led to believe that class is solely based on money. But, as I hope this essay has shown, class is about far more than what we have in the bank, it’s about cultural and social capital too, neither of which can be ‘won.’

Born into it, class is inherited through family rather than ‘earned’ through money.

So, is social mobility a myth? I'll let you decide.