Government creates class unit as social mobility advisers abolished

The government has established a new unit within the Equality and Human Rights Commission focused on white working-class people, while abolishing the Social Mobility Commission that advised on opportunity across all backgrounds.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced the change, which the Guardian reports will put white working-class communities "at the heart" of the new equalities work. The BBC frames it as a "class unit" replacing the independent advisers who monitored social mobility across the country.

The machinery is worth watching. Social mobility measures movement between generations - whether a plumber's daughter becomes a surgeon, whether opportunity spreads. Class is a category. The first asks whether the system works; the second sorts people into boxes. A unit on class can study grievance and identity. A commission on mobility had to answer whether the country was getting more or less fair, and publish the data every year.

The Social Mobility Commission produced an annual state-of-the-nation report and held governments to account on whether birth still determined destination. Its abolition removes that regular public accounting. What replaces it is a focus on one group within a body whose other work is protected characteristics and discrimination law - a different tool, borrowed from a different tradition, now applied to class.

The question the next report will answer: whether the new unit measures opportunity or manages grievance, and whether anything it recommends applies to everyone or only to those it names.