not liberal egalitarianism, or any of those more fine-tuned theories that make it possible to be a leftie and still own a house. It's not left wing and, fundamentally, it doesn't make anything any better. Even if the waters of the social fountain were in perpetual motion (and you can bet that Clegg doesn't mean that by "social mobility" -- he's talking about other people's kids having the freedom to rise, not his own having the potential to fall), you'd still have to accept, even embrace, the idea of some people living and dying in the sludge. Who could ever line up behind such a laughably shoddy vision of the future, a world in which everything looks roughly the same, but each class has had a very slight reshuffle in personnel? This debate, as it's framed by the coalition -- do you believe in social mobility, or do you believe in sink or swim? -- is bankrupt (like so much else). I don't believe in either. It's not left wing and, fundamentally, it doesn't make anything any better. Yes it does, because creating greater economic and social mobility is based on merit rather than privilege (or lack thereof). Excessive income inequality is a symptom of a lack of economic mobility, not a cause to be addressed in itself. There's nothing inherently wrong with income inequality, but there is something wrong with entrenching it. For all of history, in every land in every time, the rich have had more, gotten more,