On a personal level, what social immobility means to me is not being able to put many feet wrong without paying a heavy price. Even now, having overcome a lot of adversity, the stability of my life requires constant vigilance. I have insight into social immobility and its constituent parts, given my experience of family breakdown, unemployment, benefit dependency, alcoholism, addiction and homelessness. The tragic irony here, of course, being that social mobility has imbued these obstinate, politically enfranchised fools with unnaturally long lives, which they have malevolently dedicated to abbreviating everyone else’s. People who think social mobility was pioneered in the days of Charles Dickens, when children were socially mobile enough to manoeuvre the interior of a household chimney, armed with nothing but tuberculosis and a duster. That proof of its existence can be found wherever a person advances from a precarious life of being on benefits to an even more precarious life of in-work poverty. Now I realise, in Britain today, there remains a throng of ill-informed people who genuinely believe social mobility is real. But that’s the national epiphany that must strike our collective consciousness should we wish to preserve the basic integrity of our increasingly divided society. It’s hard for affluent people, who benefit from a decisive emotional advantage, to conceive of such a life, where emotional volatility, and not merely lack of money, is the engine room of social immobility. I’m talking about living in a constant state of emotional fight or flight which renders a person incapable of discerning which aspects of their environments are threatening and which are supportive an emotional state where reality is a wall of noise over which a person can barely hear themselves think, let alone embark on their own little capitalist hero-journey. I’m not talking about the sort of stress people use as a form of inspiration from procrastination, or as gentle propulsion to get things done. Is it any wonder that people, living in conditions of chronic emotional stress, become prey to physical, mental and emotional problems? Problems that find expression in myriad ways, in every area of a precarious life, from the classroom to the courtroom, from the doctor’s surgery to the dinner table. On not moving in any direction, whatsoever. We have even less to say about the central dilemma someone submerged in quicksand faces: their survival depends on staying exactly where they are. Now I realise, in Britain today, there remains a throng of ill-informed people who genuinely believe social mobility is real The depth of the swamp, how the giraffe got there, and the fact it has asthma are never adequately accounted for. In this context, “social mobility” is keeping your head above the sand, while politicians take credit for the fact you have a long neck, while socially ambivalent voters who think poverty is a personality defect point to your long neck as proof that society is fair.

In fact, make it a baby giraffe calling for its mother. To get a better idea of what social immobility means to someone near the bottom of the pile, living in conditions of poverty characterised by psychosocial stress, the ubiquitous threat of violence and constant financial insecurity, simply imagine a startled giraffe, with asthma, languishing in a pool of quicksand. That’s what the problem is: the extent to which no amount of hard graft or playing by the rules will result in a sudden, miraculous ascent up the social scale. What we ought to be talking about – and what would be a far more accurate and useful thing to say – is social immobility. People who use the term “social mobility”, with a straight face, are like friends and family members who get common expressions wrong and end up saying things like “it’s a doggy dog world”, “to all intensive purposes” and “he did a complete 360”. It’s like people who insist on calling nights “sleeps”, because it reconnects them to something comforting and juvenile about themselves. Can everybody stop using the phrase “social mobility” now please? The whole thing is just getting silly at this point.

Girrafe in quicksand