Social mobility has, over the last decade, occupied a prominent position in public policy discourse. Over this period, and with particular intensity during the most recent years, politicians, charities and the media have all expressed the concern that social mobility has stalled in twenty-first century Britain. The politics of austerity has increasingly been attacked as restricting opportunity and contributing to growing inequality. In 2015, Labour's election defeat was seen by the media as a manifestation of their inability to match the Conservatives as the party of 'aspiration', while Jeremy Corbyn seeks now to make Labour the party that will redress inequality and stalled mobility. In January 2018, the former chair of the Social Mobility Commission, Alan Milburn, condemned politicians on all sides for not doing enough to tackle what he described as 'the crunch issue for our society'. 1 Questions surrounding the expansion of grammar schools, the charity status afforded to public schools, and the proliferation of unpaid internships have further brought class, inequality and social mobility to public and political attention. The government's Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission continues to publish a series of damning reports highlighting profound inequalities in mobility chances in Britain. According to reports published in summer 2018 by both the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) stalling mobility is a global rather than a uniquely British problem, making social mobility an even more pressing political and social question. 2 There is, however, a distinctly British tenor to current social mobility debates. The language of inequality plays into contemporary fears of a Britain divided by not only economics and class, but also by Brexit, attitudes to immigration, and austerity politics. Headlines proclaiming that 'post-war generations [have been] shut out of economic mobility' reflect wider British concerns over generational exchange and conflict between baby boomers and millennials. 3 Examinations of the gig economy, low pay and zerohours contracts all tap into the social mobility dilemma. Perhaps most importantly the language of social mobility having stalled, frozen and shattered in twenty-first century Britain implies some previous period in which it was alive and well. Indeed, what unites discussion of the current 'problems' of social mobility is a collective, social memory of a golden age of mobility enjoyed in postwar Britain. Present-day concerns about mobility have drawn power and rhetorical force from the idea that the 1950s and 1960s in particular were a period of easy upward mobility for all.