Initially social mobility was not an important policy topic for the British political class, whatever their personal beliefs and experiences. Towards the end of the 20th century this began to change. Previous public figures had occasionally cast an eye towards mobility, but a new generation of politicians gradually came to recognise that there might be votes to be won by calling for ‘more’ social mobility.

The result in Britain has been that:

This recognition of increased political interest was not something new, having been first identified at the British Sociological Association's Annual Conference two years earlier (Payne 2005). However, relatively little evidence was then available to substantiate the case, and there is even less in the later Goldthorpe and Jackson article. The contention that interest has widened ‘far beyond the usual academic circles’ (Goldthorpe and Jackson 2007, 526) relies – with relatively brief discussion – on evidence from only four speeches, all by leading members of New Labour: Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and David Miliband in 2005 and Jim Murphy in 2006. As this chapter shows, a more systematic coverage and analysis of political speeches over a more representative period suggest that politicians’ interest in social mobility is even more extensive, if also somewhat more complicated, than Goldthorpe and Jackson imply.They pay insufficient attention to the way the meanings attributed to the term ‘social mobility’ have been inconsistent, and miss the crucial point that it is not just a consensus among the political and chattering classes about mobility, but rather a pessimistic consensus that mobility rates are variously low, falling, and/or worse than in the 1970s. While the first stages in the renewed concern over upward mobility can be traced to the 1997 election of New Labour, there has been a steady increase in invocations of mobility not just among ministers but also from opposition parties, reaching well beyond the four speeches identified by Goldthorpe and Jackson (2007).