Making It: The Trouble with Social Mobility

'Prejudice' is a dirty term. 'Social mobility', though, much better. Although I do realise that you will be looking at this and thinking, how can I make such a blunder in the opening sentence of my latest blog? Of course, I realise what that blunder might be. To say that 'prejudice' is a dirty term but 'social mobility' is good is to state the obvious; social mobility (a good thing) is the antagonist of prejudice (a bad thing) and vice versa.

Not so. The Bar is appearing to do all it can to combat prejudice and increase social mobility; it's something that the Bar Council and the Inns pride themselves on. Disadvantage should never be a bar to the Bar. But social mobility is a troublesome term. Inherent within it is the problem I'm getting at. The term contains that idea of 'mobility', movement, between classes. Which we all accept, don't we. But that movement is the very problem.

In saying that there is movement, or indeed a need for mobility, one says that the two things between which one is moving are in separate locations. There are separate. We all accept that the Bar has, traditionally, attracted a certain kind of applicant- a description so well known I shan't revive it now. Social mobility, and the need for it at the Bar, posits the Bar and barristers in the higher echelons of the class system. It is only by 'movement' from one kind of class to another that the 'un-traditional' barrister might enter the profession.

Therein lies the problem. In order to encourage applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds the Bar has had to enter into a dialogue that makes use of that awful term, social mobility. In using the term social mobility the Bar reasserts its status as a career well placed within the higher echelons and attracting people from those higher echelons. This is the difficulty. In saying the Bar is no longer prejudiced, or exclusive, or elitist (though the latter is something that the Bar must always, in a meritocratic sense, be) the Bar is, in using that term social mobility, saying that it still is exactly those same things. In saying that the Bar is something that people from disadvantaged backgrounds must be welcomed up into, the Bar is saying that the Bar is located somewhere up there.

And here it is. Being 'up there' intimidates prospective applicants who between reading the implications contained in that awful term and turning to the alarming pupillage statistics in the back of the Bar Council's, It's Your Call, decide that they'd rather just watch Silk instead. That won't land them £20,000 further in debt with nothing to show. And so, rather than try, they give up.

But that is by no means to say that the Bar's efforts are, in any way, wasted. It's just rather than 'social mobility' another less problematic term is needed. Rather than improving social mobility why don't we  forget about class and say this: if you think you've got what it takes, try.

Debating: How to Survive

I do have a favourite debating stereotype. I remember during my undergraduate days I attended the university debating society. There was something remarkably odd about most of the participants; myself, of course, excluded. They all seemed at first glance fairly quiet. Irritantingly quiet. So quiet it was exhausting to keep a conversation going beyond 'so, have you debated before?' which everyone kept on spitting out at regular intervals.

Something strange, though, happened as soon as they stood up to speak. They were loud, they were brash, they were rude, they were impassioned, they were automatons, they were titans, they were lions. Yes, lions. They were confident to the point of, not so much arrogance but, rather, frightening delusions of grandeur.

The thing that most alarmed me was just how fast they talked. I didn't understand this. Five minutes of talking seemed, to me, a lot. I didn't understand how one might feel that they needed to speak faster in order to cram more in.

I suppose you might attribute their frenzied tempos to nervousness. But it can't have been. They seemed to genuinely believe that they were gifted orators. I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

The moral here is that one shouldn't feel intimated by undergraduates with delusions that they are capable of rhetorical grandeur. Regardless of how well versed an opponent might seem you must not allow that to bother you. The tactics by which the society's members, on the whole, seemed to pursue success were little more than clumsy bullying; they were rude- they attempted to laugh, rather than reason, their opposition out of the debate; the rate and volume at which they spoke served only to humiliate and intimidate their opponents.

You, I trust, on the other hand are a gifted orator. You do not need to resort to rudeness (for which you will get marked down), shouting (too loud and you will get marked down) or being an insufferable twit. What tends to intimidate/impress peers tends to irritate/amuse judges.

As far as the debating spheres are concerned being a nice guy pays off- it's survival.