John Humphrys‘ reports on social mobility are a stylish lesson in radio journalism. His delivery, scripting and questioning are a joy.

The reports offer a great opportunity to hear from voices routinely denied access to the Today programme – the undeserving poor.

So where did this morning’s piece come off the rails?

In allowing Alan Milburn to spout his full employment, ‘deal with scroungers’ mantra? Or in recycling a little of Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone baloney.

There are two types of social mobility – intra and intergenerational.

Intra generational mobility is the kind of boot-strapping that sends shop-floor toilers up to the board room in the space of one career. What’s killing this? Erm…education. In educationalising professional training, children of the better-off vault effortlessly over the boot-strappers.

Intergenerational social mobility is the kind we see in immigrant families who’ve had to trade down socially in moving country – they set great store in education as a means of getting back on track.

Of course, the flip side of social mobility is abandoning your friends, family and community for the material distractions of rootless consumerism. As Jonathan Pryce so effortlessly declares in The Ploughman’s Lunch – “My parents are dead.”

Richard Hoggart described the experience rather more poignantly in an essay ‘Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and Anxious’ in The Uses of Literacy. He begins the section entitled ‘Scholarship Boy’ with this quote from George Eliot‘s Middlemarch

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.

Eliot was writing at the beginning of the 1870s. Hoggart’s book was written in 1957. Half a century on it might have offered a rather better platform than Mr Milburn…