Not quite sure, Jeremy, why you have started this topic, but feel moved to comment that such academic studies fail to understand or take account of the real structure of society. Also they all seem to start from a position that "Socio-Spatial Mobility" (whatever that is) is good without questioning it.

Like my wife, who came to the UK as a young woman, they think that class is all about money. But in fact class has very little to do with money. Remember the adage, "It takes three generations to make a gentleman".

It's not just about what you sound like when you open your mouth. You can nearly always tell someone's class from their appearance and gait when they walk down the street or even ride a bicycle.

This country has always enabled people to rise above their station from the time of Cardinal Wolsey and no doubt well before. There are lots of kids now going to private schools from wealthy families with no class. But the danger is that children learn as much from their peers as from their school, so you have to keep the influx to less than 20% according to the headmaster of my prep school back in the 1950's. Otherwise they will fail to adopt the standards of the rest, and will act as a drag on them. I think that is partly why standards of integrity have fallen so much since the War. Nowadays the concept of duty has largely disappeared and the eleventh commandment is the only one that matters.

But there will always be a limit to social mobility, perhaps mainly because the British are not an aspirational nation. Consider that the most popular "soaps" from America were things like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" while in Britain the most popular soaps like "Coronation Street" and "Eastenders" portray the dregs of society. Odd that this is so, because Shakespeare understood that his plays had to be about royalty or at least important people in order to be commercially successful. Somewhere in the last five hundred years we have lost the plot.

The need to communicate.

Whether a moaner or a teacher the average person tends to drift towards the audience that understands the extrapolated topic.

There is little satisfaction in competing at any level with people outside ones own competence and certainly nothing to brag about afterwards.

People of a similar class can extrapolate safely without crossing forbidden barriers. People of the same class have more understanding of the barriers and will know when they have been crossed.

More obviously successful societies in Scandinavia have much lower pay differentials and more progressive taxation. If they can succeed under such circumstances so can we. Not everyone is motivated solely by material possessions.

I agree with your last paragraph although I attended a very bad grammar school. One of my neighbours who failed his 11+ went on to become a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. I despised the tests at the time because there were usually several valid answers that the setters were too stupid to have seen.

Paul J

Most movement is upwards as the working class shrinks and the middle class grows. But it does go both ways. The classes are not in rigidly fixed proportions. My contention is that upward mobility - for those who want it - is harder than it used to be and harder than it needs to be.

A Google search on "British social mobility" will return a long list of newspaper articles, official statistics and academic research to confirm this.

I agree with you about the effect of home environment. But the wider environment has as much or more effect - schools, neighbours, friends and so on.

Graham

You are arguing nature versus nurture. Don't you know that it is both?

If it were really a matter of simple common sense we would have "built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land" centuries ago.