
Who Gets the Best Jobs?
Britain's job market, according to BBC journalist Richard Bilton, now sorts people less by ability than by who their parents know. Bilton examines hiring patterns across professional Britain and reports a claim that the country is less socially mobile than at any point since the First World War, with the best jobs increasingly going to graduates from a narrow set of well-connected families. He talks to young jobseekers from low-income backgrounds who describe hitting a wall of unpaid internships, informal networks, and interview panels that reward polish over competence, and sets their accounts against those who got a foot in the door through a parent's contact or an old school tie. The film treats education as the new dividing line, tracking how a degree from the right university has replaced the old routes of apprenticeship and on-the-job promotion. Bilton lets the testimonials carry the argument rather than statistics alone, building a picture of a labor market where merit competes directly with inheritance, and usually loses.