Life & Wisdom Quote by Ferdinand Mount

The sting in Mount's line is the quiet rebuke baked into "also": whatever else we congratulate ourselves for, this is the part we have let slide. "Further than ever" is a deliberately provocative superlative, less a statistical claim than a moral alarm bell. It turns the usual story of modern Britain (and the West more broadly) on its head. The comforting narrative goes: rights expand, prejudices recede, meritocracy inches forward. Mount implies a darker paradox: cultural liberalization can coexist with, even distract from, hardened class advantage.

"Equality of opportunity" is the phrase doing the ideological work. It's the minimalist promise liberal societies make when they can't, or won't, offer equality of outcomes. So when Mount says we're receding from it, he's not attacking utopian egalitarianism; he's saying the system is failing at its own stated baseline. That gives the sentence its bite: it's an internal critique, not a revolutionary one.

The subtext is structural and intergenerational. Opportunity isn't just about personal grit; it's the compound interest of good schooling, stable housing, networks, confidence, and the invisible permissions granted by accent and postcode. Mount's Britain has long been obsessed with class as a social grammar, but in the late 20th and early 21st century the grammar got upgraded: finance capitalism, credential inflation, property bubbles, and elite institutions that reproduce themselves while claiming to be open.

It's a short sentence that weaponizes distance. Not "we lack" opportunity, but we are moving away from it - a society actively misdirecting itself while insisting it's on the right road.