THEY’VE NO IDEA WHAT HARDSHIP REALLY MEANT
SINCE few subjects are more mythologised than poverty, inequality and social mobility, it was no surprise to see Alan milburn flouncing out of his job as the Government’s social mobility tsar with some overblown rhetoric about our supposedly divided country.
No fair-minded person would deny that Britain is not as equal as it should be. Too often the system seems rigged in favour of the powerful, and there often seems a glaring gulf between the very richest 1 per cent and the rest of us.
yet listening to mr milburn’s baleful words about ‘social division’, you could be forgiven for thinking Britain was one of the poorest and most bitterly divided nations on earth, instead of one of the richest, safest and most stable.
Indeed, despite all the political bluster, most indices of national income inequality and relative poverty show that they are lower now than at any point since the mid- 1980s. On top of that, Britain’s major national institutions, such as the BBC and our great universities, are rightly keener to welcome outsiders – especially from racial and ethnic minorities – than at any time in history.
It is often said that Parliament, for example, is shamefully unrepresentative. But when you look at the figures, there have actually never been more female, black and Asian mPs, and there have never been more mPs from state schools.
What the arguments about social mobility and inequality really lack, in fact, is a sense of perspective. Listening to some strident Left-wing commentators, who talk as if Britain were some nightmarish Third World dystopia, I wonder if they have any sense of history at all.
Only a generation or two ago, millions of people in this country lived in conditions of appalling dirt, damp, disease and dereliction. As recently as 1950, almost half of all homes had no inside bathroom.
many families had to share an outdoor toilet with their neighbours. The lucky ones had their own loo, hidden in a dingy little shed, yet at night they still had to dash across the yard carrying a lamp or candle.
What was more, millions of people would have marvelled at the kitchen appliances, high-definition televisions, mobile phones and central heating that almost all of us take for granted today.
In 2017, even most of our poorest families own televisions and mobile phones. yet as late as 1956, some 14 per cent of British homes did not even have electricity. As one Cornishman later remembered, his family cooked on a range, warmed themselves
EVEN if people did have electricity, central heating was virtually unknown for all but a tiny minority.
‘We did everything in one room and that was the room with the fireplace in it,’ remembered one woman. ‘The fireplace not only heated you, it boiled your water, it cooked your food, it was where you had your bath, it was the main hub of the house.’ even in the supposedly swinging sixties – which are often remembered as a high point of equality and social mobility – millions of people endured privations that seem almost unimaginable today.
In 1963, for example, an investigation by The Times newspaper found that many workingclass families in London were living in Third World conditions.
One young couple, ‘near to tears’ with shame, showed the reporter around the tiny rented room in which they had to live.
‘There was no water, except for a cold tap in the back yard down three flights of dark, rickety stairs,’ the paper reported. ‘The one lavatory for the 11 people in the building was too filthy to
use. Cooking facilities had to be shared. The house was rat-infested and the walls so ridden with bugs and beetles that the girl was afraid to replace the ancient wallpaper which helped to some extent to keep them from crawling into the room.’
Such stories were far from unusual. In 1964, the writer Geoffrey Moorhouse visited industrial Lancashire and was shocked to find another young family crammed into a tiny terraced house facing a gigantic factory wall, with no bath, toilet or even running hot water, in a street where the chimney smoke meant their laundry was dirty again even before it was dry, while their baby was ‘covered in smuts after five minutes in his pram’.
Even at the end of the 1960s, researchers in Nottingham’s poverty-stricken St Ann’s neighbourhood found thousands of people living in houses ‘in various stages of dilapidation and decay; houses that lack the basic amenities taken for granted by most people’.
That meant no central heating, no inside toilets, and sometimes no hot running water. ‘You get dirty in St Ann’s quite easily, but it is hard to get clean,’ the investigators reported. ‘It is often damp. It is often cold. It is never easy to make it dry and warm.’ Of course Britain today is far from perfect, and life for those at the bottom can still be a struggle against hardship, anxiety and deprivation.
Yes, too many people rely on food banks. And yes, too many young people struggle to find rewarding jobs, get on to the property ladder or carve out a meaningful role in society.
Yet all too often, in our love for national self-flagellation, we forget the fundamental fact about modern Britain, which is that most of us lead warmer, healthier, richer and more comfortable lives than any generation before.
I realise, of course, that this is not what many people want to hear. Only three years ago, the BBC’s Norman Smith – the Corporations assistant political editor – claimed the Coalition government’s spending cuts were taking Britain back to the ‘land of The Road To Wigan Pier’, a reference to George Orwell’s searing book, published in 1937, which explored the lives of poor families in the depths of the Great Depression. At the time, plenty of commentators seized on Mr Smith’s parallel as proof that Britain was sinking into some dark age of poverty, inequality and mass starvation. But of course this was nonsense.
For the vast majority, the world of the recent past, in which millions of people fought a daily battle against hunger, darkness, damp, disease and dirt, has mercifully disappeared.
So too has our automatic deference to a patrician class who believed themselves born to rule, and moved smoothly through Eton and Oxbridge to wield the levers of power in politics, the Civil Service and the military. Although it is true that social mobility for many people is painfully slow, it is too lazy to blame this on government policy. In fact, almost every government in living memory has tried to make social mobility a priority.
The truth, unpalatable as it may sound, is that massive economic and technological changes have destroyed the manufacturing jobs that once provided so many people with a leg up. Indeed, the pace of technological change may well mean things get worse before they get better, as we adjust to the new world of computers and robots.
No amount of top-down State initiatives, and no amount of fiddling with the tax and benefit systems, can change that.
Of course there is still a role for government. But it would be a terrible mistake to introduce the kind of quotas so beloved of the Left, with Oxbridge colleges forced to admit state-prescribed numbers of students from ethnic minorities, or British businesses compelled to favour job applicants from ‘deserving’ postcodes.
The most obvious priorities, to my mind, are to ensure that every child has the benefit of a rigorous education (which is, alas, still far from the case); to offer proper technical training instead of encouraging non-academic youngsters to waste their time at university; and to attract more overseas businesses in the wake of Brexit.
So yes, we need to think hard about the problem of social mobility in a society where manufacturing – the single greatest ladder in the post-war age – has largely disappeared. But cracking it will take hard, painstaking, unglamorous work – not public handwringing and political posturing.