I should probably be a poster boy for the Social Mobility cause:

I grew up in social housing in a very troubled household, received free school meals and clothing vouchers and didn’t spend any time with my dad until I was 13.

I left school at 16 with no qualifications and then talked my way late into the GCSE year at the local technology college when I was 20 – and ready – for the academic part of my lifelong learning to begin.

I was a Regional Manager for a National Charity in my late 20’s, Managing Director of my own specialist transport business contracted to a National Newspaper Group at 30 and Chair of a Licensing Authority where I was also an elected member, all before I was 40.

I laugh – sadly for all the wrong reasons – whenever I hear self-aggrandising politicians regurgitating the term ‘Social Mobility’.

I know, only too well, that very few, if any of them, understand the real and many different reasons that so many of us do not achieve our real potential – if they should actually choose to try and do so.

The people we have running the Country certainly don’t appreciate that there is a lot more to the solution than the so far futile idealistic attempts to impose a fix