Have-it-all Labour ignore lessons of human physics

Yes! He's back! Alan Milburn, the moody Bryan Ferry of New Labour's Roxy Music (sorry, I meant 'rocky administration'), whose sob-in-the-throat vocals and floppy forelock have seduced many a naive teeny-popper (sorry, that should have been 'floating voter').

And what's Alan's latest hit going to be? Yes, you guessed it, he's singin' about social mo-bi-li-ty.

A new white paper is being launched this week by Milburn and the equally charismatic Cabinet Office minister, Liam Byrne; its aim: to take a soulful look at the barriers to working-class entry to the professions.

The important thing is the middle classes needn’t feel threatened by the review

Milburn has noted that social mobility declined markedly between the golden year of his own birth - 1958 - and the mid-1970s, and that there it has stayed, with only 33 per cent of those born into the lowest income group managing to bootstrap their way into the top two.

Obviously this is a dreadful state of affairs, and clearly if we want politicians of Milburn's calibre we have to look beyond the playing fields of Eton. Milburn himself was raised by a single mother on a council estate, and while there are doubtless plenty of single mothers currently around with offspring that have his potential, thanks to the Government very few of them will be living in social housing.
 
But I digress, the important thing here is that the middle classes (who nowadays consist of just about anyone who doesn't get a tax credit) needn't feel threatened by the Milburn/Byrne review. Byrne views it as a "classic liberal error" to assume the haves will need to suffer in order for the have-nots to have any.

No less a forward thinker than the Prime Minister himself says that worldwide there will be a billion skilled jobs created in the next decade - more than enough for our oppressed masses. Hell, if this review gets it right we may be inviting the entire Chinese peasantry to come and live here, so they can attend the Henley regatta with a Fortnum's hamper.

Mind you, it isn't that the PM thinks there will be that many new positions in the established professions, it's that formerly menial jobs such as childcare will become professions. In the brave new Britain of 2019 there won't be harassed child-minders, but professorial pre-school child educators, who'll free up their parents to go and work in... Er, call centres?

If it weren't so laughable, you'd weep. This is just the kind of have-it-all thinking that led to the massive expansion of higher education under Labour; so that we've now got millions of 20-somethings with media studies degrees but have to call a plumber in from Gdansk. Meanwhile, such established professionals as - D'oh! - academics are increasingly overworked and underpaid.

In the past some of these twerps were packed off to the forces or the Church

No society can have all chiefs and no Indians, and in order that poorer but more able kids should be able to succeed it's important that richer and thicker ones should be encouraged to fail. This isn't classical liberalism - it's physics. We've all been there: treated by the dumb doctor, defended by the clueless brief, and financially advised by the chinless and innumerate scion of some noble house.

The upper reaches of the establishment are chock-full of dimwits who only made it there because they were force-fed with the best education money could buy, then winched up by the steel hawsers of nepotism and other caste connections.

In the old days at least some of these twerps could be packed off to the forces or the Church, but nowadays there's no room for them in the former (the Royal Family alone accounts for at least half the requirement of officer-thickos), while the latter is having to cater for the rampant spirituality of thousands of formerly prohibited women priests.

No, the only solution is for upper-middle and upper class parents to sit down with young Gervaise and explain - kindly and patiently - that it would be best for society as a whole, if, instead of going to Marlborough and Oxford, he became a landscape gardener. Luckily many of these families will have their own landscape for him to work on.

Such a posh dumbos set-aside scheme may not immediately decrease the promulgation of duff political policies - after all, a mere eight of the current cabinet were privately educated - but in the longer run we can be sure that the playing field will be level rather than Etonian.

And if there are any mavericks - such as Milburn himself - who go on trying to persuade us that the go-round of social and economic equality can be painlessly squared, they will be eliminated by those colleagues who've stayed closer to the 'hood. ·