Is Burnham’s Oxbridge-heavy cabinet a sign of social mobility or lack of progress on class?

Like 20 British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham’s new cabinet minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, went to Eton. After graduating from the country’s most elite private school, Narayan attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied – what else? – PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), like David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Ed Miliband and a host of other senior politicians. An MBA at Stanford and a career in the City followed.

But Narayan’s background is hardly typical of the British ruling class. Born in Bihar in eastern India, he moved with his family to Cardiff when he was 12. He and his younger brother were sleeping on the floor of their one-bedroom home when a teacher at his local high school suggested the bright young boy apply for some private schools. His parents, who had joined the Labour party almost as soon as they arrived in Wales, ran a petrol station. Eton was possible only thanks to a full scholarship.

Class and representation in 21st-century Britain can be complicated. By some yardsticks, for example, the makeup of Burnham’s ministerial team, which was announced after he became prime minister on Monday, could be seen as a backward step. More than a fifth of his cabinet attended private schools for most of their education – at times, under Keir Starmer, every senior minister went to a state school. And a remarkable 54% of the ministers now leading government policy went to Oxford or Cambridge, up from 29% under Starmer. (Nationally, the figure is 1%.)

In other ways, however, Burnham’s top team is more diverse than before, with half of those attending cabinet – including, of course, the PM – representing northern constituencies. And for the first time in history, the cabinet has equal numbers of women and men. One of them, the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is among those who were educated privately – this after she and her family arrived in Britain as asylum seekers from Liberia in 1986.

How much does all of this matter? The prime minister’s top ministers ought to be competent – do they need to be representative too?

To Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, which works to promote social mobility, the answer is an emphatic yes. “Of course, the background of the cabinet matters. If they’re meant to be representing the country, they should be representative of the country. We would absolutely say that you get better decisions if you have a wide range of views, perspectives and backgrounds around the table.”

The sample size of 28 cabinet attendees may be small, but to Sam Friedman, a professor of sociology at London School of Economics whose work focuses on class and inequality, its makeup is symbolic of the wider access to power in Britain. Scrutinising those in senior positions “provides a window into a wider conversation about how people’s backgrounds shape their ability to reach the top positions in our society”, he says.

Power in Britain remains overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a very narrow group of people, according to Friedman’s research. He points out that pupils of the nine most exclusive private schools are still, today, 52 times more likely to reach elite positions than those who go to any other type of school. Oxbridge graduates born in the 1960s and early 1970s – Burnham was born in 1970 and went to Cambridge – were more than 250 times more likely to reach the British elite than their peers who did not go to university.

The cabinet – whatever its makeup – is merely the visible tip of a vast iceberg of powerbrokers, whose own elite backgrounds can be key in the way government decisions are taken, argues Friedman. According to his own research surveying attitudes among the elite, he says “those who are brought up in more privileged backgrounds tend to tilt to the right”, and “people in positions of power in the cabinet are often interacting with civil servants and business leaders who mediate their ability” to take decisions.

To Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, it is legitimate to scrutinise the backgrounds of those running the country, but “counting private schools and Oxbridge degrees only tells part of the story. The real challenge is whether ministers understand how Britain’s contemporary opportunity system now works.

“Traditional markers such as school attended or parents’ occupations no longer signal advantage in the straightforward way they once did. Today’s divides are increasingly shaped by wealth, place, networks and the hidden cultural codes that govern entry and progression into our elites.”

The challenge goes way beyond widening access to the traditional routes to power, important though that may be, Major argues. Instead, politicians of whatever background must grapple what he calls “the profound unravelling of the promise of modern capitalism” – the fact that, for people in their 40s and younger, there are now more people experiencing downward mobility than upward, meaning they are less well-off than their parents.

“The test for this government isn’t whether ministers themselves are socially mobile. It’s whether they can create a society in which many more people have genuine opportunities to flourish,” Major says.

Dr Daniel Evans, a lecturer at Swansea University whose work includes a focus on politics and social class, agrees. “The origin story [of politicians] is a bit of a red herring,” he says. “The bigger story is the total collapse of the graduate premium and the debt that students are getting into in university and how brutal the job market is for graduates.

“We keep talking about social mobility as if everyone can do it, but university is out of reach for loads of people financially, the job market is horrendous. No one can get a flat. The discourse hasn’t kept up.”