Top professions 'operate closed shop to exclude the poor' - Times Online.

A government "report" on access to the professions has just been published. It shows that in the last 30 years law, medicine and other professions have become more socially exclusive. So I have blogged myself, from personal observation. However, The Times reports;

The report on access to the professions was commissioned by Gordon Brown and written by Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary. He said traditional and modern professions had a “closed shop” mentality, blocking mobility and shutting their doors to children from poorer backgrounds.

Stuff and nonsense. I can't speak for the medics but I will tell you quite plainly what the "mentality" of the legal profession is. We want to provide excellent service with a view to maximum profit. Our major problem in this is the "war for talent." For most of my career, able candidates have been at a premium, as witness the absurd heights to which entry level salaries have risen. In more than 20 years of being involved in hiring lawyers, I have never heard social criteria considered. Never. Not even once. If they had, I would never have been advanced myself and I can assure you my humble background was never once a problem.

If candidates can serve our clients well and make us money in the process, we will hire them. If they can't we won't. Many senior members of my firm are state educated, but they are of course from the grammar school era. Social mobility *is* undoubtedly decreasing, but Labour has a bloody nerve to seek to blame us for that. Personally, I despair to see so few candidates who remind me of myself as a keen young man from nowhere. If I were ever to discriminate unfairly, it would be in favour of such a person.

Labour's education policy for the last 30 years is the problem, as is the fact that it is still unchallenged by the lily-livered Cameron. Our "mentality" is the very opposite of a problem. Make the state education system work, and we will hire its best and brightest without hesitation.

You Milburn, and your odious cohorts, are to blame for this wasteful, deplorable situation. You have blighted the lives of millions and left the learned professions with a limited choice of suitable people to work with. Your class war has damaged the people you purport to serve but still you want more of it, you blinkered fool.

Of course your "report" blames us, rather than you. That was what it was for. Your lies are lies, even when the word "report" is printed on their cover.