The working class toiled for decades to give their children a better life – but their dreams are now in tatters
FOR generations the working-class men and women of our country clung to one hope – life, no matter how hard it got for them, would surely be better for their children.
Those optimistic days are gone.
A new report into social mobility warns that in our increasingly divided society, young people from poorer families are likely to find life much tougher than their parents.
House prices are soaring.
Wages are falling.
Those born in the Eighties were the first generation since the war to not start their working lives on a higher salary than their parents.
Alan Milburn, the Labour man who fronts the Social Mobility Commission, warns: “The 20th century expectation that each generation would be better off than the one preceding it is no longer being met.”
We already know this in our bones.
The decline of social mobility means, in Alan Milburn’s memorable phrase, millions of “treadmill families”, who have to run as fast as they can just to stay on the spot.
But the rich get richer.
The end of social mobility has resulted in the rise of the privileged mediocrity, second-class men with first-class educations like Cameron and Blair.
The future no longer belongs to our young.
Wages are five per cent lower than they were before the crash of 2008.
Home ownership among the under-44s has dropped by 17 per cent in the last ten years.
Behind the rosy employment figures there is a nagging job insecurity that is never revealed by statistics.
The 50 years of national optimism are now history.
“The rungs of the social mobility ladder are growing further apart,” says Milburn.
In fact the ladder hardly exists any more.
Yes, the Prime Minister comes from a modest background but Theresa May is every inch the product of a
Grammar school education, those hives of social mobility wantonly destroyed by Labour and later despised by privately-educated toffs like Cameron and Blair.
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Now the place you are born is likely to be the place where you will stay for ever.
The young can’t even dream of owning their own home.
State-educated children get nowhere near the top jobs.
And the goals that our parents worked so hard to achieve, like my own father who worked at three jobs to pay the deposit on our own modest home, are now impossible dreams.
This state-educated PM might possibly bring back schools that fast track the brightest children of the poorest families.
And taking back control of our borders could mean some sanity returning to the housing market.
But at this moment we are witnessing the slow, inexorable death of social mobility in this country.
And with it the death of all our hopes and dreams, for ourselves and for our children.
This is nothing short of a national tragedy.
Once the working class believed that things could only get better.
Now we know that life will only get harder.
Eddie's a silent star
AFTER all those finger-wagging, virtue-signalling luvvies lecturing us about refugees, Eddie Redmayne is refreshingly content to keep his opinions to himself.
“I’m only an actor, who cares what I think, frankly?” says Eddie, currently starring in JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.
“Sometimes, politically, people don’t want to know.”
People never want to know, Eddie. Benedict Cumberbatch, the loudest luvvie in la-la land, is no more qualified to lecture us about refugees than a window cleaner or a dental hygienist.
And pontificating gets in the way of the work.
I can’t be the only film lover who has skipped Doctor Strange because I simply can’t look at Benedict Cumberbatch’s smug mug for two hours.
It mutt be love for dog fans
IF YOU are not a dog lover, then you probably wonder why so much fuss was made about the last walkies of Walnut the whippet.
But if you have a dog, then Walnut’s bittersweet goodbye will have torn at your heart.
Mark Woods took Walnut, 18, for his final stroll on his favourite beach in Newquay, Cornwall.
Answering Mark’s invitation on Facebook, hundreds of dog lovers joined them.
And after that last walk, when the ailing whippet had been gently put to sleep, Mark revealed that all those bracing walks on the beach with Walnut pulled him from crippling depression.
“I have been ill in my life. I think – ‘My God, what would have happened if Walnut wasn’t there?’
“He was a big help, someone to give a cuddle to.
“No backchat, no issues, nothing to tell me. Just love.”
The downside of loving a dog is that when you take on their life, then you must also take on their death.
But loving a dog guarantees you three things – fresh air, unconditional love, and heartbreak.
Disgraceful Dubai
ONE million Brits visit Dubai every year. One of them was Zara-Jayne Moisey, who was allegedly gang raped and, under strict Islamic laws, now faces charges for having extramarital sex and drinking.
How much longer can we pretend that Dubai is some luxurious, sun-dappled Disneyland for fun-loving European adults?
When you go to Dubai, you turn back the clock.
To the 15th century.
Why the elite should get real
FOR a man who changed the course of British history, it is quite remarkable that to the liberal elite Nigel Farage is still a joke figure.
But without Farage and the rise of Ukip Mr Cameron would never have called a referendum on our membership of the EU.
Without Farage we would have tugged our forelocks to Brussels for another 50 years.
And even if the liberal elite can’t bear to give Farage any credit, they should at least use his impressive contacts.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, in January he becomes the most powerful man on the planet.
Only hurt pride and wounded vanity prevents the British Government from using Farage’s contacts with the new American President.
The liberal elite, from Broadcasting House to Westminster, increasingly remind me of those old communist leaders in Eastern Europe just before the Berlin Wall came down.
Even now, as the world changes before their eyes, they still have not grasped that they are on the wrong side of history.
Brits the exception
LORD John Kerr, former British ambassador to the European Union, says that our country needs immigration because “Brits are so bloody stupid”.
If he spat this poisonous bile about anybody else, they would do the bitter old Eurocrat for hate speech.
Fisher's Ford fling
HER memoirs reveal that Carrie Fisher had a brief affair with Harrison Ford during the filming of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and yet every report on the relationship is illustrated by an image from Return Of The Jedi (1983).
Because in the first Star Wars film Carrie’s character wore a full-length, shapeless white sheet and had that nerdy hair-do like headphones.
But in the third film she was spilling out of a gold bikini while chained up as Jabba the Hutt’s favourite concubine, right.
So there are six years between Carrie’s teenage fling with Ford and the woman in her mid-twenties waiting to be rescued from Jabba’s clammy tentacles.
Which just goes to prove how much the world still really loves looking at Princess Leia when she was Jabba the Hutt’s slave girl.
Boris balls-up
FOREIGN Secretary Boris Johnson is quite right to say there is no basic human right to wander into any country that takes your fancy.
But Boris is dead wrong to suggest that freedom of movement was never what the European Union was all about.
The four freedoms of the EU – freedom of movement of goods, capital, services and, above all, people – are the fundamental principles of the European Union. The death of national identity is what the whole rotten project is built on. And exactly why the British are leaving!
THE corrupt old men of Fifa have opened an investigation into England and Scotland wearing emblems of remembrance, proving that Fifa knows the bribe for everything and the value of nothing.
A Nobel clause for Bob
WHEN they award their prestigious gong, the Nobel Prize committee is accustomed to the world’s big shots reacting like the grateful, gushing teenage winner of a Miss Universe contest.
But Bob Dylan does things his way.
Dylan will not be attending the ceremony to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature due to “other commitments”.
If someone wins a Nobel Prize, they usually drop everything to collect the award, unless they are on their deathbed.
True, Dylan tours almost constantly – he is playing a gig in Florida tonight – but it is clear he isn’t exactly overexcited to win the Nobel Prize.
“We look forward to Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture, which he must carry out – it is the only requirement – within six months,” an Academy spokesman sniffs.
Don’t hold your breath.
I bet they wish they had given it to Leonard Cohen.
Dim on Donald
GUARDIAN journalist Monisha Rajesh tweets: “It’s about time for a presidential assassination.”
You think so, Monisha?
If somebody assassinated President Trump, America would erupt into the kind of murderous violence not seen for 50 years. Pray to whatever god you worship that nobody assassinates the next president of the United States.
