At the launch of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, Nick Clegg told a familiar tale about enhancing opportunities:  “your talent, your hard work, rather than the circumstances of your birth, should decide what you can be”. Equality of opportunity has become a rehearsed statement of intent for all parties, yet only some seem to understand how this can actually be achieved.

The truth is that, on its own, it is a myth. An unachievable aspiration that does not make any sense, unless accompanied by higher levels of equality of outcome. Clegg pointed to the “circumstances of your birth” that should not hold back individual potential, but a greater willingness to understand these circumstances and equalise them is necessary for the kind of equal opportunities that he wishes for. Despite the rhetoric of “hard work”, and the idea of a fluid capitalist economy, in which individuals ambitiously forge successful careers for themselves, class still matters. Individuals are constrained by social forces.

Those who are born into households with parents in professional and managerial jobs are much more likely to obtain high-status jobs themselves, while those with parents in semi or non-skilled employment often remain at the lower end of the occupational scale. Children may go to the same school, and receive an equal level of education, but overwhelming sociological evidence shows that they are unequal in their capacity to make use of this education: class-based differences in educational attainment increase over the course of schooling.

It is for this reason that a greater emphasis on the social and collective would be beneficial for the individual. This election is not a choice between the ‘freedom’ of the Conservative Party on the one hand, with its commitment to a smaller state and open markets, and the enforced socialism of Labour and more left-leaning parties on the other. It is rather a choice about what kind of ‘freedom’ we want to see advanced in society. Believing that less state involvement and unregulated markets provide an inevitable path to freedom is a peculiar concept of ‘freedom’ indeed. It requires an obsession with ‘freedom from’ any sort of external influence, and allowing individuals to occupy a private sphere in which they can pursue the life they want.

The problem is that many individuals do not have the capacity to do much with this ‘private sphere’. In such an unequal society, freedom from external influence becomes the freedom to be unemployed, the freedom to go to a foodbank, the freedom to be stuck in poverty. Rather than thinking of freedom in the narrow sense of ‘freedom from,’ we should also consider what individuals are free to do. As Nick Clegg emphasised, the aim should be for individuals to have the best opportunity to realise their potential and achieve what they want to achieve. Increased state involvement in economic life and the strengthening of public services would enhance this.

But no amount of educational reform or spending on public services will increase opportunities for the many, unless the wider economic structure of society is challenged. Education so often does not achieve the kind of social mobility that it aspires to. If its positive intentions are to be realised, the underlying inequalities currently produced by capitalism will have to be lessened. A greater sense of collective to which individuals could belong would provide more social incentives for contributing to ‘the whole’, and lessen the desire to withdraw into a continual life of poverty and benefits.

Stigmatising the unemployed for their lack of graft and effort only serves to reduce the self-esteem of those out of work and the confidence required to participate in society. And this presents one of the biggest barriers to wider support for equality of outcome. “Why should we be taxed more for the hard work that we have put in?” comes the cry.

The reality is that equality of outcome is intrinsically related to equality of opportunity. The idea of an autonomous individual who can achieve their potential and ambitions outside of the social structures that they are part of is a delusion. Clegg’s desire for “your talent and your hard work” to be the basis of “what you can be” must take greater account of the economic structures preventing this from happening.

A more social vision of society, in which the state had greater involvement in the economy, might involve more external interference, but it would enhance the ability of many individuals to actually do something with the ‘private space’ that they occupied. Freedom is at stake in this election, and it is not the austerity-driven parties who can provide it.