No plan for social mobility under Labour, government advisor claims
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Labour has no “overarching narrative” to use different policies to create social mobility – help people improve their personal prosperity, according to the government’s advisor on such matters.
This may not be news to many of us; it is only a matter of weeks since the Labour government was criticised for failing to improve conditions in six out of nine public service categories, with a seventh having worsened.
The latest brickbat has flown from social mobility commissioner Alun Francis. Here’s the BBC: “A report by the commission released last week warned that “extreme regional disparities” existed in the UK, with many former industrial and mining areas worst affected.
“Among the conclusions of week’s report were that a child’s family background still heavily shapes their education level and future life chances in the UK.
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““We have a government that talks quite a lot about social mobility, but mainly about individuals – often about [the] social mobility of themselves or their colleagues,” Francis said.
““But what we don’t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.”
“Without an overall strategy, he said, the government would “struggle to address some of those issues and have a clear-headed view about what we might do to improve things”.
“A government spokesperson called the number of young people outside education, work or training a crisis that couldn’t be ignored and said a review by Alan Milburn would help build a system that ensured every young person had an opportunity to make something of their lives.”
The really damaging point here is not just that Labour currently lacks a coherent social mobility strategy, but that this is something a party claiming to be a government-in-waiting should have had fully worked out long before the general election of 2024.
Social mobility is not a niche policy area. For Labour, historically, it is meant to be the core justification for its existence: improving life chances for people born without privilege.
If Keir Starmer arrived in government without an overarching framework for that, it strongly suggests one of two things – either the leadership does not see social mobility as central any more, or it assumes that market-led growth will somehow deliver it automatically.
Neither reflects well on Starmer’s project.
Alun Francis’s criticism cuts deeper than a complaint about coordination. When he says there is no “overarching narrative”, he is pointing to the absence of a governing philosophy.
What exists instead is a collection of technocratic interventions – skills here, housing there – without a clear answer to the basic political question: what kind of society is Labour trying to create, and how do power, wealth and opportunity move within it?
That matters because social mobility cannot be delivered by isolated policies – it depends on how education, housing, transport, regional investment, labour markets and welfare interact over time.
Without a unifying strategy, “stop-start” policy is not an accident; it is the inevitable result of governing by managerial instinct rather than political purpose.
There is also an ideological problem lurking beneath this: Francis notes that ministers talk about social mobility mainly in personal terms – their own stories, their own trajectories.
That reflects Starmerism’s broader tendency to individualise structural problems; mobility becomes a matter of personal effort and aspiration rather than collective conditions.
In that framing, the state’s role shrinks to smoothing the edges, not reshaping the system.
The regional disparities highlighted in the report expose this weakness brutally: it is impossible to talk seriously about social mobility while accepting an economy where former mining and industrial areas remain structurally locked out of opportunity.
That requires deliberate, long-term redistribution of investment and power away from already-successful regions – something this Labour leadership has consistently been reluctant to support, for fear of spooking business or the right-wing press.
The fact that the government’s response is to point to yet another review – this time by Alan Milburn – reinforces the impression of drift.
Reviews are commissioned when governments lack either clarity or courage. They are not substitutes for a strategy that should already exist.
This is very much part of that wider criticism of Starmer having no plan – but more specifically, it shows that Labour entered office without a settled answer to one of the most fundamental questions it should exist to address.
That is not a teething problem of government; it is a failure of political preparation.
For a party that spent years insisting it was ready to govern, that failure is hard to excuse.
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No, Steve Reed, badmouthing the four-day week won’t make it a ‘failure’
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Why does Labour think it’s more important for people to work five days a week and be unhappy than to work four days and be both happy and productive?
It’s a loaded question I know; the jury is still out on whether working fewer days actually produces the result claimed for it.
An honest future-direction message
Vox Political will end on December 31, so if you haven’t subscribed to The Whip Line yet, please consider doing so before then!
“Vox Political is nearing the end of its fourteenth year, and I want to be honest with you: the online advertising model that kept the site free to read has deteriorated so sharply that it can no longer sustain the work.
This is not a reflection on the readership; it is a structural shift affecting small publishers everywhere.
Rather than quietly winding down, I’m giving you clear notice: Vox Political will close at the end of the year unless something dramatically changes. The good news is that The Whip Line already exists, is reader-funded, and is growing. That is where I can continue producing the journalism you value, free from the chaos of advertiser algorithms.
If you want the work to continue, please join me there. Free and paid subscriptions are available, but please remember it is the paid subscriptions – monthly and annual – that directly fund the reporting.”
And also, there are some scenarios in which a four-day week may not be practical.
But Labour’s Steve Reed, who has apparently declared war on local councils operating the four-day week, is not being entirely honest in his choice of rhetoric.
To find out why Steve Reed’s choice of words is questionable, head over to The Whip Line.
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Does the farm inheritance tax U-turn confirm this theory about its purpose?
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I think it does.
“Government proposals to tax inherited farmland have been watered down, with the planned threshold increasing from £1m to £2.5m,” says the BBC.
“The climbdown follows months of protests by farmers and concern from some Labour backbenchers.
“At last year’s Budget, ministers said they would start imposing a 20% tax on inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1m from April 2026, ending the 100% tax relief that had been in place since the 1980s.”
An honest future-direction message
Vox Political will end on December 31, so if you haven’t subscribed to The Whip Line yet, please consider doing so before then!
Vox Political is nearing the end of its fourteenth year, and I want to be honest with you: the online advertising model that kept the site free to read has deteriorated so sharply that it can no longer sustain the work.
This is not a reflection on the readership; it is a structural shift affecting small publishers everywhere.
Rather than quietly winding down, I’m giving you clear notice: Vox Political will close at the end of the year unless something dramatically changes. The good news is that The Whip Line already exists, is reader-funded, and is growing. That is where I can continue producing the journalism you value, free from the chaos of advertiser algorithms.
If you want the work to continue, please join me there. Free and paid subscriptions are available, but please remember it is the paid subscriptions – monthly and annual – that directly fund the reporting.
In fact, the tax would have only kicked in above £3 million in total assets, thanks to retained allowances.
The new announcement means a single farming estate can now pass on roughly £3 million tax-free before the new tax bites at all.
A married couple or civil partnership, with normal estate planning, can pass on more than £5 million, and potentially closer to £6 million, before any 20 per cent charge applies to agricultural assets.
Only values above that level would be caught.
That is a very significant shift towards confirmation of what I suspected all along.
To find out what I suspected all along, head over to The Whip Line.
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October 7, ‘reasonable grounds’ – and a biased ‘rating’ organisation
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An organisation called Newsguard recently contacted Vox Political, saying it was planning to update that site’s reliability rating – and could I answer some questions?
Those questions, and the assumptions behind them, demonstrate exactly why organisations like Newsguard are worse than useless as guides to a news website’s reliability.
Let me explain:
The relevant part of the email I received about my other site said: “An October 2024 article titled, “Keir Starmer’s statement about
October 7 is full of falsehoods” [3]appeared to suggest that there was
no evidence that Hamas committed sexual violence during its October 7,
2023 attack on Israel. The article said, “The United Nations
investigated Israel’s claims of rape by Hamas and its allies during
the 7 October raid. It found that there was no claim that was supported
by evidence and some that were provably false – all the claims were
either ‘unfounded’ or ‘unverified’ and what little
‘evidence’ Israel claimed to present was demonstrably
‘inaccurate’ or at best ‘unreliable’. The UN’s investigators,
both women, ‘could not verify any sexual violence’.”
The March 2024 United Nations [4] report stated “There are reasonable
grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during
the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery,
including rape and gang rape in at least three locations.” While the
UN acknowledged that it did not directly interview the victims and
witnesses, the commission said it based its findings on “information
gathered by the mission team from multiple and independent sources.”
It added that “The applicable standard of proof adopted by the mission
team is one of ‘reasonable grounds to believe,’ consistent with the
practice of investigative bodies, including those established by the UN
Security Council and Human Rights Council.”
The UN report does not appear to have stated that it “could not verify
any sexual violence” and that all claims were either “unfounded”
or “unverified”.
Despite the isolated cases of some witnesses being discredited, other
research conducted since the end of 2023 documents an extensive amount
of credible evidence. For example, the New York Times [5] conducted a
two-month investigation published at the end of December 2023 in which
it examined “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones
and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical
personnel, soldiers and rape counselors.” The research “uncovered
painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were
not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based
violence on Oct. 7.”
”1. Does VoxPoliticalOnline have any comment on this apparently
countervailing information, and why it was not included in this article?
One of our criteria assesses whether a site provides information about
its content creators, such as short biographical information or contact
details.
”2. Is this information available anywhere else on the site that I might
have missed? If not, do you have any comment on the site’s approach to
disclosing who’s in charge of content?
”[3]
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2024/10/07/keir-starmers-statement-about-october-7-is-full-of-falsehoods/
[4]
https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/report/mission-report-official-visit-of-the-office-of-the-srsg-svc-to-israel-and-the-occupied-west-bank-29-january-14-february-2024/20240304-Israel-oWB-CRSV-report.pdf
[5]
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/briefing/hamas-sexual-violence-child-labor-nikki-haley-civil-war-ukraine.html”
An honest future-direction message
Vox Political is nearing the end of its fourteenth year, and I want to be honest with you: the online advertising model that kept the site free to read has deteriorated so sharply that it can no longer sustain the work.
This is not a reflection on the readership; it is a structural shift affecting small publishers everywhere.
Rather than quietly winding down, I’m giving you clear notice: Vox Political will close at the end of the year unless something dramatically changes. The good news is that The Whip Line already exists, is reader-funded, and is growing. That is where I can continue producing the journalism you value, free from the chaos of advertiser algorithms.
If you want the work to continue, please join me there. Free and paid subscriptions are available, but please remember it is the paid subscriptions – monthly and annual – that directly fund the reporting.
Let’s kick the second question out straight away: Vox Political has never concealed authorship and I always write under my own name. That is made abundantly clear on the site’s relevant pages and the Newsguard reviewer appears not to have bothered reading those pages. From this, we may conclude that they haven’t read the site properly.
Turning to the substantive issue, the simple fact is that I had not seen any evidence that sexual violence was proven – and I do not see any such proof in the information put before me by Newsguard.
This was the conflict in which Israel alleged that Hamas “beheaded babies” until it was conclusively proven that that did not happen. The sexual violence claim struck me as a similar attempt at a propaganda attack. That’s not to say the acts are morally equivalent, but that the information pipeline followed a familiar pattern: allegation first, amplification second, verification later — if at all.
For clarity:
A United Nations fact-finding team led by the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict concluded there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that some incidents of sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred at multiple locations during the October 7 attacks — including the Nova music festival site, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. It also noted patterns such as victims found undressed, bound and shot, which the team said were circumstantially indicative of sexual violence.
The team reported “clear and convincing information” that some hostages were subjected to rape, sexualized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment while held in captivity after their capture.
However:
Investigators did not themselves interview most alleged survivors of sexual violence at the time of the attacks because many victims were killed, buried, or inaccessible.
Forensic evidence directly documenting specific rape acts was largely absent in the official reports. Instead, the conclusions are based on patterns in bodies recovered (found undressed or partially undressed, bound, shot), eyewitness accounts, and secondary sources provided to the team.
The mission explicitly did not have a full criminal investigative mandate and thus did not attribute specific acts to specific individuals or gather evidence in the way a criminal prosecution would require.
There are no widely released, independently verified, forensic case files in the public domain that show:
- A named individual survivor describing a specific rape attack that can be independently corroborated, or
- Incontrovertible forensic evidence tied to a specific attacker.
Verification, in journalistic terms, requires independently auditable evidence capable of being tested — not inference, pattern recognition, or institutional assertion.
There is an important distinction here: “reasonable grounds” does not equate to “proven beyond reasonable doubt.”
Investigative reporting (for example by major news organisations) has added credible contextual accounts — but not forensic proof — such as:
- Testimonies from some survivors and witnesses describing sexual violence or the impression of such acts taking place.
- Pattern evidence from photos, videos and accounts suggesting that in some locations attackers stripped victims or committed other acts consistent with sexual violence.
However, none of these reporting efforts has produced publicly verified case files or criminal-standard evidence published for independent forensic review, so the available information does not amount to incontrovertible, independently verifiable proof.
In other words: I was right to say that none of the claims of sexual violence have been independently verified to a criminal or forensic standard. Vox Political reported accurately on the evidentiary status of the claims at the time and remains within the bounds of what can still be demonstrated.
Newsguard has not demonstrated that Vox Political published a factual falsehood, but instead substituted a different evidentiary standard after the fact and then tried to treat disagreement over that standard as a “credibility” issue.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that allows a “ratings” organisation to appear neutral while in practice enforcing a very particular political and narrative frame.
Newsguard’s challenge relies on “narrative authority”, not evidence. It cites a UN report that explicitly acknowledges it could not verify individual cases, and a New York Times investigation that relies on anonymous sources, second-hand testimony, and interpretive pattern analysis rather than independently-auditable evidence.
None of that contradicts the core claim in my article – that specific allegations were unproven and, in many cases, previously shown to be exaggerated or false.
The “beheaded babies” example matters here because it establishes a documented pattern of atrocity propaganda being laundered through sympathetic media before collapsing under scrutiny. That historical context is not incidental; it is directly relevant to how claims should be assessed.
Third, Newsguard’s wording is revealing. It does not say “your article is factually wrong.” Instead, it says the article “appeared to suggest” something, and then contrasts that with material that still stops short of verification.
That is not fact-checking; it is “narrative correction”. In other words: I did not say what they believe I should have said.
Newsguard is not acting as an impartial assessor of accuracy, but as an enforcer of establishment consensus, where scepticism of Israeli government claims is treated as a red flag, evidentiary caution is reframed as denial, and organisations are penalised not for getting facts wrong, but for refusing to adopt officially sanctioned interpretations.
Note: I am not saying that sexual violence definitely did not occur. I am acknowledging uncertainty and insisting on higher standards of reporting. The argument is that uncertainty is being misrepresented as falsehood when it runs counter to a preferred geopolitical narrative.
Newsguard’s ratings function less as a guide to reliability than as a mechanism for disciplining dissenting media – and I won’t accept that; I never have.
Neither should you.
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