How to get ahead in Britain

What was Gordon Brown's argument?
That as a child, he had benefited from what he called "the first great wave of social mobility" in the late 1950s and 1960s; but that these advances, as recent figures revealed, had stalled in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving a "lost generation" of "Thatcher's children" in their wake. For anyone wedded to the goals of "the classless society" and "equality of opportunity" this was obviously bad news, but Brown vowed not to "explain away the figures" but to treat them as "a spur to action, a call to conscience".

Do the figures support his case?
They certainly seem to. The conclusion of the two most influential academic studies on the subject – published by the Sutton Trust in 2005 and 2007 – is that Britain has become a more rigid society, and that poor children born in the 1950s had a better chance of escaping into the richer classes than children born in the 1970s. On international comparisons, the studies also found that the UK, along with the US, had much less social mobility than Scandinavian nations and quite a lot less mobility than Germany.

But is this so surprising?
Not really. The 2007 Sutton Trust study begins with a declaration that "minimising the relationship between family background and later economic and social status is an important goal of public policy"; yet in reality, government policy has far less influence on social mobility than the changing shape of the economy. The death of heavy industry and explosion of white-collar jobs from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, enabled many working-class Britons to rise up the economic ladder without displacing those already in "middle class" jobs. But that shift has run its course, and as "back-office" tasks are transferred to Asia, and more and more middle-class women enter the workforce, the opportunities for the working class to advance have shrivelled – and the figures seem to refl ect this. What is perhaps surprising, although not highlighted in the Sutton Trust studies, is that even though British society has grown more rigid, the figures still suggest a relatively high degree of upward and downward movement between classes.

So what are these figures on which the studies rely?
They're based on national survey data charting the careers of two sets of British boys – those born in 1958