Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG

Josiah Bounderby, the villainous business magnate in Charles Dickens’ , takes great pride in recounting his self-made narrative. He epitomises rugged individualism in his tale of overcoming childhood poverty and familial abandonment.

But Bounderby is humiliated when his devoted mother Mrs Pegler is inadvertently introduced to the town. We learn that Bounderby may have been poor, but he was not alone. His mother did all she could to strive for his success in spite of the family’s material disadvantages.

In Dickens’ caricature, we see that the concept of the self-made man is fundamentally flawed. Individuals are not atomised entities, whose beginnings can be reduced to rich or poor. They are the sum of nature, nurture, and serendipity. It undermines any conception of meritocracy that assumes individual success can be separated from formative circumstances.

Bounderby exaggerates his deprivation to magnify his achievements. The more hopeless his beginnings, the more heroic his triumph appears. It shows an individualism that pervades in meritocracy and victimhood alike. The extent of one’s adversity is testament to the power of individual will in success, and the strength of structural oppression in failure.

This is why Margaret Thatcher’s famously misinterpreted rejection of society wasn’t simply an exposition of individual liberty. Rather, she meant that it doesn’t exist as an abstraction independent of families and communities. Thatcher may have called herself a meritocrat, but it is incoherent without her social conservatism.

Because equality of opportunity, in its purest form, is at odds with a conservatism that recognises orders of obligations. Recent Conservative pledges to scrap Labour’s implementation of VAT on private schools or Kemi Badenoch’s ambition to abolish Inheritance Tax completely “as soon as we can afford it” are vulnerable to meritocratic criticism. They confer unfair advantages onto subsequent generations. But the desire to pass advantages onto one’s children is a natural expression of parental responsibility we should foster.

Aspiration is not stirred by purely individualistic instincts, and so meritocracy always faces this generational handicap. We should therefore admit the force of left-wing opposition to the concept expressed in Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy or the academic Michael Sandel’s more recent The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel believes it is an ad-hoc justification for inequality. He says that winners “must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work.”

But conservatives should believe that success need not be solely a product of individual agency and capability to be desirable. Government cannot equalise opportunity through policy alone. Instead, it should nurture the circumstances in which people are most likely to flourish.

It is an approach I see in Singapore, which celebrates meritocracy but, like Thatcher, recognises its dependence on social conservatism. Its policies actively favour family-first environments that offer stability and support in a child’s upbringing.

One example is found in its unique home-ownership model where 90 per cent of housing is owner-occupied. Based on subsidised government housing, it offers families privileged access. A single adult cannot buy one of these flats until they are 35. Married couples can from the age of 21. Policy does not treat all arrangements identically when some confer greater social benefits.

Britain too knows certain circumstances tend to yield better outcomes. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found in its 2022 Families and Inequalities research that parental separation was associated with lasting disadvantages in children’s educational attainment and later earnings. Those findings were used by Reform to support prioritising couples for social housing. It led to a social media spat between its Deputy Leader Richard Tice and Labour’s Bridget Phillipson, who both grew up in single-parent households.

Yet they draw different conclusions from that experience. For Phillipson, her upbringing demonstrates that traditional structures matter little. For Tice, individual success stories should not obscure the wider statistical picture. It’s not a question of whether children from single-parent households can succeed, but whether exceptional individual experiences should override broader statistical evidence in shaping policy.

Labour’s stance, as expressed by Philipson, means it is little surprise the party abolished the Social Mobility Commission in September. Its chair, Alun Francis, challenged a “narrow focus that treats the family unit as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a foundation to be supported.” Francis found that while material circumstances and grades were correlated, they were “”. Household stability and strong social networks were at least as important in determining a child’s start in life.

So how does Singapore’s family-friendly environment compare when it comes to results? Well, its advantages in social mobility over Britain may appear relatively modest. A child born into the poorest fifth of Singaporean society has a 13.8 per cent chance of reaching the richest fifth, compared with 11.4 per cent in Britain. That is a difference of just 2.4 percentage points, albeit one that makes upward mobility roughly 20 per cent more likely. But Singapore achieves it without capital gains or inheritance taxes, precisely the structures that we would expect to entrench inherited advantage.

The comparison is starker in light of the wider economic picture. Over the past decade, real household incomes in Singapore have risen across the distribution, with those in the lower income bracket enjoying the strongest annual growth, at 3.1 per cent. In Britain, by contrast, annual household income growth languishes below 1 per cent across the distribution.

Meritocratic idealism encourages an unhealthy obsession with social mobility. It treats the advantages parents strive to confer on their children as injustices to be corrected. Yet, in Britain, such a course has achieved little in either relative mobility or absolute prosperity. Neither poverty nor privilege should determine one’s fate, but it is naive to imagine that government can make the circumstances of birth irrelevant.

This is ultimately the lesson of Bounderby. He is neither a tribute to the triumph of individual will nor a justification for state intervention to eliminate every obstacle he supposedly overcame. He mistook success for a solitary achievement. He believed he conquered his circumstances but conveniently ignored the formative relationships that sustained him. Government should not try to make such advantages irrelevant, but bring them within reach of more people.