THREE of the seven newly appointed members of the government’s Social Mobility Commission are Tory Party activists — with most of the rest being right-wing ideologues.

There are two messages behind these numbers. First, the government is willing to use any government institution to cement political power for its party, no matter how absurd.

Secondly, it’s a direct message that the best way to actually get “social mobility” is by joining that party — if you want to get ahead, be an active Tory and you’ll get a chance for a lucrative and prestigious job.

These commissioners get £250 a day plus expenses for around one day a month’s work. That’s a handy £3k for a side hustle and also gives commissioners an approved platform to help expand their careers.

The Social Mobility Commission was founded back in 2010 by Labour as the Child Poverty Commission to monitor progress in anti-poverty reform. David Cameron’s government renamed it the Social Mobility Commission in 2015 and changed its focus.

Instead of trying to stop poverty, the government was now committed to accepting poverty, but allowing some people to escape it via “social mobility.” But Cameron’s Tories still allowed right-wing former Labour MP Alan Milburn to lead the commission.

However, with Theresa May taking the Tories another notch further right, Milburn’s position became impossible: May left commissioner’s posts vacant for years, the commission could not function, so Milburn resigned.

Now, having gutted the original commission, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have re-invented it as a government-funded, Tory-led think tank.

The new commissioners include Rob Wilson, a former Tory MP and minister under Cameron and May. Wilson was knocked out of Parliament by Labour in 2017, but when democracy lets down the Tories, they compensate with state power, giving men rejected by voters government jobs.

Wilson is joined by Tory Party activist Resham Kotecha. She stood as a Tory parliamentary candidate in 2015 and 2017 and helps run various Tory campaign groups like Conservative Friends of India and Women2Win, May’s campaign to elect more Conservative women to Parliament.

Kotecha is currently head of government affairs for money transfer firm Wise Payments. According to her CV she went first to public school, then to Cambridge — neither really hotbeds of social mobility.

The third Tory commissioner is Ryan Henson, a Conservative Party candidate in the 2019 election and a Tory councillor for four years. Henson is currently chief executive of the Coalition for Global Prosperity, a rather military-oriented group campaigning for Britain to keep up its aid budget in order to maintain international influence. Henson was previously an assistant to two Tory MPs.

These Tories are joined by politically motivated ideologues. They include British academic Matthew Goodwin. He is keen to use his academic reputation — such as it is — to boost right-wing causes. Goodwin is an “adviser” to Toby Young’s “free speech union,” which promotes hard-right ideas and speakers under the guise of “free speech.”

Alongside his University of Kent professorship, Goodwin has a job helping run the Legatum Institute, a right-wing think tank founded and funded by offshore investors based in Dubai.

Rob Henderson is another new commissioner. He is from the US, currently studying for a PhD at Cambridge. Having been very poor, then fostered, then an officer in the US Air Force, then an undergraduate at elite US university Yale, Henderson actually has real personal experience of social mobility.

He is fairly solidly on the right and already has some standing in US right-wing circles, working with right-wing “intellectuals” like Jordan Peterson, and is keen on the idea that decline of “male role models” and “traditional family structures” is, more than poverty, what stops boys thriving.

The final two commissioners, Shell executive Parminder Kohli and senior medical researcher Dr Raghib Ali, do not have such obviously Tory or ideological backgrounds.

This collection of Tories, oddballs and amateurs is led by the chair of the Social Mobility Commission, Katharine Birbalsingh, who arguably is herself an oddball Tory amateur.

Birbalsingh, who was made chair last year, is a teacher, but came to prominence giving a speech at the 2010 Tory Party Conference making Tory-friendly arguments that the problems in our schools aren’t due to underfunding, but instead the fault of “low standards,” “liberal culture” and bad kids.

Birbalsingh was rewarded with the headship of an academy secondary school to practice her views. As head of the Social Mobility Commission, Birbalsingh can be relied on to blurt out victim-blaming right-wing talking points and arguing “culture” not investment is what causes poverty.

Birbalsingh recently told a select committee of MPs that girls are less likely to do Physics at A-Level because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy,” adding, “I just think they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do.”

Birbalsingh also recently argued that Black Lives Matter protests against racism are bad because they just demoralise black people: “That is something that I think the Black Lives Matter movement does and it undermines much of the work we do at school in trying to empower our children to take personal responsibility and grab life by the horns.

“Yes, there are obstacles, and yes, there is racism. But the way to succeed is to find a way to jump over those obstacles, not to sit and complain that life is hard, not to put your hand out to the white man and tell him to give you something. I want kids to take control of their lives, and victimhood does not help anybody.”

She went on to say that Black Lives Matter “has turned into something relatively ugly” which will “undermine” black kids.

If it looks like Truss has just given a bunch of clownish, right-wing loudmouths government jobs, that’s because she has. But that doesn’t mean this circus might not help them distract from bigger problems.

The Tory government is using the state to churn out Tory propaganda which can then be quickly recycled by its friends in the media. It’s a crude trick, but it does work.