... Britain as being a crusty, closed and disharmonious society. It is important to get under the surface and look at society as a whole. My thesis is that the rest of the society - you and me, the people who are competing for good jobs and rewarded positions - is remarkably open. The reason that Blair is under the impression that Britain isn't meritocratic is probably due to the fact that for 30 or 40 years the sociological establishment in Britain has been telling him and other politicians that it isn't a meritocracy. This can be explained in part by available research on social mobility. Using each person's starting position as their own benchmark, there's a remarkable amount of movement up and down the occupational scale in Britain, America and Australia. However, if you look at the relative chances of a child who is born at the bottom of the heap, to ...

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