“When a British government is deeply bothered by something, it enacts legislation. “When it isn’t, it commissions an inquiry” or – worse still – “appoints a tsar”.

Britain is currently less socially mobile than at any point in the last 60 years. A person called James Caan, an “entrepreneur”, who was recently appointed as the Government’s tsar on social mobility, made an impassioned plea to  middle-class parents, asking them not help their children get jobs. It then emerged that Caan’s two daughters, Hanah and Jemma-Lia, are both employed by companies he owns.

Britain is littered with these self-promoting “personalities”, who at best are window dressing for a socially indifferent government that is comfortable with as much social immobility as it can get. Meanwhile, there have been “tsars” of enterprise, mathematics, and hospital food whose qualifications have been that they have been seen more than once on telly. Nothing changes. Of course.

(Based on an article by Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times.June 13 2013)

Social immobility is a long-term menace to society. It is also un-Epicurean. It should not be trivialised in this pathetic manner.  Epicureans are not stupid  – they know that parents will always help their children;  they are programmed to do so.  The problem lies not with parents but with money in politics  given by the super-rich in return for low – or no – tax.