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Latham's ladder: Latham's twenty-first century vision pulls out a tired old metaphor historically associated with 1950s British conservatism.

Article Excerpt
There's going to be a lot of talk about Mark Latham's 'ladder of opportunity, predicted Susan Mitchell in the Weekend Australian a few days after Latham became Leader of the Australian Labor Party. Latham had announced his vision for Australians in the twenty-first century: I stand for the things that I've been doing all my life--working hard trying to climb that ladder of opportunity ... I believe in an upwardly mobile society where people can climb the rungs of opportunity. Mitchell thought that, at first glance, the ladder of opportunity was a good image, but added that the tough questions to be asked and answered revolve around access to climbing that big old ladder to success and fulfillment.

A ladder is tall and very, very thin. Access to it is difficult; equality of access is impossible. Extolled as an innovative concept by Australian Labor's newly minted leader, it is in fact a very tired old metaphor, and one associated with the right of the political spectrum: with the Conservative Party in Britain in the 1950s.

Against the old-style Conservatives' emotional attachment to the most traditional and hereditary features of British life, emergent neo-liberal Conservatives in the 1950s espoused the ideal of a more vigorously marketised and competitive society. They used the concept of the 'ladder of opportunity' to popularise their vision. The ladder notion was identified clearly with this embryonic Thatcherite grouping within British conservatism; and it was rejected by the British Labour Party, even by the Gaitskellite revisionists.

Leading Gaitskellite theoretician Tony Crosland observed in 1956 in The Future of Socialism that the 'ladder' concept has become the "ideological myth' of the 'progressive' British Tory, who allegedly finds his ideal in those societies, such as Australasia, Canada and above all the United States, which appear to embody it most completely. Crosland emphasised that the 'liberal' conception of equality--the 'limited goal' of equality of opportunity--was not sufficient, for he stressed the importance of the...

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