Lee Elliot Major, then chief executive of the Sutton Trust, and Stephen Machin, an economist at the LSE, wrote this as a short, evidence-led corrective to a debate that had become mostly rhetoric. Every party claims to want a country where background does not determine destiny; almost none of them, the authors argue, is honest about what that would require. The book assembles decades of British data on income and education to establish what mobility actually looks like here, how it compares internationally, and why the standard political prescriptions keep failing to shift it.
The core argument
Their case rests on a distinction most politicians blur. Absolute mobility — more people ending up better off than their parents — depends largely on economic growth and on the shape of the job market. Relative mobility — the chance that a child born at the bottom swaps places with one born at the top — is a zero-sum question, and Britain performs poorly on it by international standards, with countries like Canada, Denmark and Finland doing markedly better. The uncomfortable implication is the one the book keeps returning to: you cannot have more upward mobility without downward mobility, and no British government has been willing to say so. That is where the “enemies” of the title come in. They are not villains but ordinary, rational advantaged families doing what advantaged families do — hoarding opportunities through house prices in the right catchments, private tutoring, unpaid internships, cultivated networks and the professionalised scramble for university places. Add rising income inequality, which widens the rungs of the ladder, and the machinery for reproducing advantage runs largely on autopilot.
Key ideas
- Absolute versus relative mobility. Conflating the two lets politicians promise mobility for all while avoiding the fact that relative mobility means some people move down.
- Opportunity hoarding. Middle-class parents behave sensibly for their own children in ways that collectively close off routes for everyone else — an emergent problem, not a conspiracy.
- Inequality and mobility are linked. The wider the gaps in income and wealth, the harder each rung is to climb, which is why education policy alone cannot fix mobility.
- The academic race is rigged early. Gaps in attainment open before school and compound through it; the authors put heavy weight on the early years and on getting the strongest teachers into the poorest schools.
- The forgotten majority. Policy fixates on getting a handful of bright poor children into elite universities while neglecting technical education and the two-thirds who never go to university at all.
- Employers as gatekeepers. Recruitment practices, unpaid internships and firms that decline to train their own staff are treated as a mobility problem in their own right, not just an education one.
Who it’s for
This is a compact, well-sourced introduction for anyone who wants numbers rather than anecdote on British inequality — students, teachers, policy-curious general readers. The authors write from a broadly social-democratic position and are frank about it. Two fair criticisms: the prescriptions, while sensible, are largely familiar interventions in education and early years, and can feel modest against a diagnosis that identifies inequality of outcomes as the root problem. And some readers will note the book largely accepts social mobility as the goal, where a rival argument holds that a more equal society matters more than an efficiently sorted one — the authors gesture at this but do not resolve it. As a clear-eyed account of why the meritocratic story Britain tells about itself does not survive contact with the evidence, it is very good.