This project addresses the recent academic, public and political debate about whether social mobility is declining and the considerable anxieties around the issue.  The research, undertaken with Yaojun Li (as above) together with Fiona Devine, involves a quantitative analysis of patterns and trends in social mobility in the 1980s and 1990s using the General Household Survey and the British Household Panel Survey. Yaojun and Fiona have found that men’s absolute upward mobility is on the decline although long-range mobility from working-class to middle-class positions is still evident.  In contrast, women’s absolute upward mobility has increased considerably.  In terms of relative mobility, we concur with others that there has been a very slow move towards increased fluidity in the system.  We plan to extend this work with a more sophisticated `quasi-cohort’ analysis to see how mobility patterns and trends can be associated with different political eras to ascertain the extent to which politics can make a difference.