Our local library, a sandstone beauty in a small northern city, is less a reading room than a shelter for the disaffected. Its banks of computer screens attract pairs of young men in wind-tunnel tracksuits and hats with flaps. One helps the other to spell; one scrabbles through Bebo requests while the other paces the floor, shooting looks to command the field; both take mobile calls on the promise of splitting £100 cash at a mate's house.
If "the underclass" are as thick as is commonly assumed, how come they're so good with technology? The men who sit next to me are twice the size of their grandfathers and yet their hands can hit keyboards with precision and speed. But they're not trading stocks or updating their CVs; they're making sure their social networks are maintained and are kept in their place. As long as everyone stays the same, it's fine.
This week's Cabinet Office publication on raising aspirations among young people living in deprived areas rightly made a connection between their desire to stay on at school after 16 and the strength of their social bonds. If entire peer groups show no inclination to stay on, individuals within those groups find it extraordinarily difficult to go against the grain. No one wants "a shit life", which is how I heard one such man describe it, but getting out of one requires resources that the group to which they've gravitated lacks: self-confidence, skills and a lack of loyalty. The creed of "us" against "them" remains powerful.
Do you really think the young men in the library once aspired to spending their days knocking around the shops, with their baby's buggy on one hand and a can of cider in the other? Is that how different you think they are to you? This is life for many men in once industrious, industrial northern cities, where fewer teenagers - particularly white boys - express the wish to stay on at school than anywhere else in the country.
Goals, particularly those to do with education, are crucial in the absence of other opportunities. There hasn't been a day in my life that hasn't been dominated by some sort of goal. If I hadn't attended daily to realising a dream of an independent, autonomous life - with a partner who believes without question in the equality of men and women, with a job that fulfilled and stimulated me, with friends unthreatened by differing worldviews - then it wouldn't have come true. I cannot tell you how much these facts of life mean. They mean an escape from servitude, drudgery, violence, depression, infantilisation, and daily bullying by unseen forces.
The awful circumstances in which people find themselves are not part of some natural order. People respond to mean conditions with meanness: not always, but more easily than those who live with abundant opportunity. Carolyn Steedman's classic book Landscape For a Good Woman details the soul-gnarling effects of thwarted aspirations on family life. Everybody wants to be somebody; whether you get to be somebody depends, overwhelmingly, on where you're from. Only football and pop stardom give the impression of being blind to postcode.
The fact that parents now have higher aspirations for their daughters than for their sons shows that they have made a rational adjustment to the opportunities that are on offer. The service economy, reliant on strong communication skills and consensus-building, favours the feminine. By contrast, as researchers from Cardiff University found, many young men growing up in former industrial areas cannot stand the humiliation of such work and prefer to stay unemployed.
Yet they must either stay unemployed for life, or cave in to minimum-wage work, if they are to stay within the community that raised and which supports them. To find better work they must leave, whether by going to university or by moving, effectively, to the south-east. This is why the northern cities highlighted in the Cabinet Office paper are still leeching people to the south.
But if young people are encouraged to develop aspirations to attend university, to broaden their horizons and to have new experiences, they will almost certainly have to leave their neighbourhoods in order to do so. In areas of strong social bonds - where everyone does the same thing and where there is no threat to the collective sense of what "people like us" are able or unable to do - leaving will cause a rupture. They have to be able to manage the often passive, sometimes forceful, rejection it entails.
What I am saying is that social mobility is painful. If inducements to move "upwards" are delivered from the top down to individuals, rather than generated within communities, those who leave behind their peers may never again feel entirely comfortable in any social group. The old group will express its hurt at "how you've changed"; the new one will seem blithe and over-entitled. No one wants to waste their life. No one wants their lives to be petty and aimless. Everyone wants, in some way, to be productive. The goal of the Cabinet Office team must be that no one pays over the odds for the privilege.