Stormzy: A Rapper Who’s Successfully Addressing Britain’s Social Mobility Crises.

A young inner city grime artist is doing more to tackle Britain’s longstanding social mobility problems than any British politician has in recent history.

Stormzy via Wikimedia Commons

David Lammy, the British member of parliament for Tottenham in London, son of immigrants from Guyana — a former British colony in the Caribbean, right on the tip of South America —made a freedom of information request to the Oxford and Cambridge, the foremost universities in the land, with a view to ascertaining the nature of social mobility in 21st century Britain.

This inquiry was conducted by Britain’s prominent black parliamentarian ahead the parliamentary vote to increase tuition fees in 2010. As expected, there was a high degree of reluctance from the nation’s leading tertiary institutions to divulge what people have always expected — that admission to Oxbridge ( a portmanteau for Oxford and Cambridge) was essentially, a white upper-middle class and southern affair.

For children of the working classes, those from the north of England as well as those from the inner cities and migrant backgrounds, Oxbridge was a closed door; this was evinced by the fact some Oxford colleges had failed to admit a Black British student in the five years leading up to 2010.