This 'social mobility' debate completely misses the point

Alan Milburn has sparked off the wild goose chase, yet again, for example per the BBC:

Top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families, a report into social mobility has said. Former minister Alan Milburn has chaired a study for the prime minister on widening access to high-status jobs.

Now, let's look at high-paying jobs generally and split them into two broad categories.

1. There are those which require some combination of innate skills, education/training, hard work and/or luck. Let's include top footballers, pop stars, film stars, Formula One drivers and of course entrepreneurs in this list. Nobody in his right mind would suggest that these groups are particularly the domain of the middle or upper classes. Of course family and other connections help, but they are not the be-all and end-all.

2. Then there are "the professions", as defined by Alan Milburn, which appears to be journalism, medicine, law and the civil service.

a) Yes, there is nepotism in the media, but in the non-State sector (i.e. everything but the BBC and Channel 4) there is a natural limit; if the sons and daughters of other journalists produce a crap output, circulation and advertising revenues will fall and the newspaper or TV station will fail. Nepotism in the State sector is a disgusting waste of taxpayers' money of course, but then again, State-controlled broadcasting is a disgusting waste of taxpayers' money, so that's easily fixed.

But aside from journalism, his list of "professions" are what I like to refer to as "people who profit from the misery of others, largely at the taxpayers' expense".

b) 'Doctors' is a tricky category as it does require some innate skills and a lot of hard work to qualify, the work is probably not particularly enjoyable and serves a useful purpose, but by the same token, most doctors are paid for by the taxpayer, most handsomely, it would appear. And their pressure group the BMA certainly has ideas above its station, it being at the forefront of the bansturbators.

c) The whole criminal justice system appears to be there largely for the amusement and enrichment of judges and lawyers rather than the protection of the public, despite being funded by the long-suffering taxpayer. Even in other areas, the income of the legal profession depends on the government enacting ever more laws to generate ever more work for them. That's why we'll never get a commonsense rule like divorce courts recognising pre-nuptial contracts, because it would deprive swathes of the legal profession of their incomes etc. Ditto 'employment law', 'human rights law', 'environmental law' etc etc.

d) The civil service is far too big anyway, we just don't need three-quarters of it. So that fixes that problem, rather than 1,000,000 top civil service jobs being hogged by the upper classes, there'd only be 250,000. I'd rather see 750,000 top civil servants being given the sack that create an additional 1,000,000 civil service jobs to be reserved for working class people (as defined).

To sum up, the question is not "Why do so few working class kids make it into the professions?" (whether they do or don't is difficult to prove or measure), the question is "Why are the professions so bloody well-paid in the first place?".

"Top UK judge backs pre-nuptials"

Whoo-hoo! Sounds like there's a judge with his head screwed on!

Of course the reason why our government refuses to contemplate recognising pre-nup's is because messy divorces earn their colleagues in the legal profession a fortune and give Family Courts and all manner of social workers the opportunity to stick their noses into people's lives and mess them about.

Let's not forget that in many civilised countries there are default statutory pre-nups, where the couple can choose from a few basic options, ranging between a) everything to be split 50/50 on a divorce and b) complete segregation of all assets and income from day 1, no sharing on divorce. Or you can do a customised one.

I'd also recommend
- adding another box to say whether maintenance will be payable or not post-divorce;
- making the couple agree how it will be decided who gets the kids (e.g. automatically the lower earner, or automatically the mother, or automatically the father once kids have reached a certain age. I prefer 'toss-of-the coin', myself, on this one - reduces moral hazard aspect); and
- having a default statutory rate of child maintenance of say £40 per child per week up to age 18 (which couple can vary if they wish to be a % of non-caring parent's income, for example).

That's that fixed.