LabourmobilityMoving pictures
O
nmay1stitwillbe 25 yearssinceTony
Blair’s electoral landslide of 1997. To
understand his Britain, watch “Billy Elliot”,
a film that would be released three years
later. It tells the story of a lad from a Dur
ham colliery town during the brutal min
ers’ strike of 198485. He dreams of becom
ing a ballet dancer. Jackie, his father, is dis
gusted. Then he relents, and sends him
south to London, and to dance school. It is
a story of triumph over birthplace, class
and gender norms.
John Prescott, Mr Blair’s deputy and a
burly union man, wept at it. Upwards and
outwards was the spirit of the age. Mr Blair
preached an “opportunity society”, which
would “put middleclass aspirations in the
hands of workingclass families”. To con
tend with globalisation, New Labour
sought to swell universities’ rolls and
break open the professions to the children
of tradesmen. Social mobility also meant
geographic mobility. New Labour was
proudly metropolitan. Ministers recruited
Richard Rogers, a daring architect, to ad
vise on how to lure Britons to the cities that
had emptied out a generation before.
For today’s zeitgeist, watch “Every
body’s Talking About Jamie”. This film, re
leased in 2021, tells the story of a working
class boy from Sheffield who dreams of es
caping to become a drag queen. Like Billy,
he is berated by his macho father. Unlike
Billy, in the end he finds fulfilment with
out leaving home. Billy is a paean to the in
dividual; Jamie to the community.
For the political tide has turned. Britain’sleaderswantmoreJamiesandfewer
Billys. A new consensus has formed—that
something was rotten with the old idea of
social mobility, and that labour mobility is
a problem to be tamed. Britain has a badly
lopsided economic geography, with gradu
ates drawn into a handful of productive cit
ies, and poor towns in weak regions often
left to flail. The government’s “levelling
up” agenda seeks to decouple social ad
vancement from moving away, and to give
voters prosperous lives in the places they
were born, under the slogan “Stay local, go
far”. Labour Party figures also declare that
no one should have to leave their home
town to do the job they want. Billy no mates
Universities are out of fashion, accused by
ministers of creating a “brain drain” that
denudes poor towns of their talent and of
churning out graduates with valueless de
grees. The professions are also out in the
cold. Ministers visit many factories and
few law firms. Tory thinking is reflected in
the work of David Goodhart, who, in the
“Road to Somewhere”, argues that Western
societies are divided between rooted
“somewheres” and mobile “anywheres”.
The city has lost its shine, too. Brexi
teers, says Boris Johnson, were “voting
against London”. The 1990s produced Hel
en Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, a witty
novel about a singleton Bangor graduate
who romps through the capital. Its con
temporary counterpart is Jo Hamya’s
“Three Rooms”, a bleak tale of a pennilessOxford graduate who flees London for her
parents’ house.
The turn against mobility rests on no
ble intentions but sometimes fuzzy analy
sis. Despite perceptions of people moving
ever more, overall migration between ar
eas of England and Wales has been pretty
stable since the 1970s, calculates Tony
Champion of Newcastle University.
Poor towns are not suffering a great ex
odus of Billys. Rather, they are character
ised by comparatively few people leaving
and few arriving. The middle classes are
more likely than their workingclass coun
terparts to move away from home for work
and degrees. And when people do move,
they tend to switch between similar areas:
from rich neighbourhood to rich, and poor
to poor, notes the Social Mobility Commis
sion, a state advisory body. The flow from
poor areas to rich ones is relatively small.
Worries about a “brain drain” to univer
sities are also misplaced. The problem
with poor towns is not that their educated
young move away, but that they are poorly
educated to start with. A recent paper from
the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think
tank, found that towns such as Grimsby
and Wisbech are indeed net exporters of
graduates: they produce more young peo
ple who get degrees by age 27 than they
have graduates of that age in their popula
tions. But the reason to be concerned is
that the percentage of children educated
locally who go on to get degrees is low. The
paper found a similar net loss in wealthy
towns with high enrolment rates and big
graduate populations, such as Tunbridge
Wells and High Wycombe—a phenomenon
which causes politicians less anxiety.
The promise of creating highlypaid
work everywhere is not credible, says Hen
ry Overman of the London School of Eco
nomics. “The hyperlocal version of this is
wishful thinking,” he says. A more realistic
strategy would try to encourage big clus
ters of graduate roles in a few northern cit
ies to rival London. That would produce
more highskilled workers, who tend to
reap greater pay rewards for moving than
the lowskilled. They would then percolate
between more places in Britain, as new and
productive hubs emerged. In other words,
if Britain were successfully “levelled up”,
the result may well be greater migration,
not less.
The turn against migration is a political
project, not an economic one. It is ad
dressed to those voters who felt disregard
ed or “left behind” as their schoolmates
packed their bags and their towns seemed
to decline. And yet migration can stir other
emotions, to which politicians might also
appeal. In the closing scene of “Billy Elliot”,
Jackie travels to London to watch his now
adult son star in “Swan Lake”.Asthe score
crescendos, and Billy burstsontothe stage,
a father’s eyes well with pride. n“Billy Elliot” is out as a philosophy. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is inThe Economist April 30th 2022 Britain 25