'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.
