Rescuing
Democracy in the United Kingdom from our current Elected
Dictatorship
|
Spin,
not face-to-face confrontations with the voters, is the
Government's chosen method of communication. Ordinary people
are dangerous. Ordinary people might ask a question which
throws a politician 'off message'; the Cabinet member might
reveal himself or herself to be a human being like us, and
not a programmed android. Worse still, he or she might tell
the truth.
Ann
Leslie - Daily Mail, September 16, 2004
Blair
wants to leave his mark on history - looks more like a stain
to me.
Peter
Thorndyke, Diss, Norfolk - Daily Mail, May 23, 2005
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Britain
has traditionally been one of the biggest net contributors
to the EU because we do not get as much money back from
Brussels in farm and regional subsidies as our rivals.
According
to Treasury figures, between 1995-2002, Britain's average
contribution taking the rebate into account, was £2.6billion,
or £43.55 per head of population.
The
French - the biggest recipient of farm subsidies - contributed
£1billion a year or £16.08 per head of their
population.
|
Stagnant
Britain
Martin
Vander Weyer
says that social mobility has declined under New Labour, and blames
misplaced egalitarianism and hostility to competition
The
Spectator - May 28, 2005
What
with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month and Lady
Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity
Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social
mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained
what scientists call inertia-free perfection.
Daily
observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between
the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the
rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and
a father with friends in high places, no longer buy you a double
six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap
in any career in which you might ever have to open your mouth
in public.
In
the House of Lords, there are almost twice as many classless Blair
appointees as there are remaining hereditary peers. Among the
British-born multimillionaires in the upper reaches of the annual
Sunday Times Rich List, self-made, first-generation fortunes
outnumber old money by six to one, and many of those successes
have been achieved from the humblest of beginnings.
Where
I live in Yorkshire, for example, we salute brothers Eddie and
Malcolm Healey, worth £1.5bn, who started with a DIY business
in Hull and ended up acquiring the Marquess of Normanby's vast
Warter estate. Wherever you look, it seems, there is evidence
that those with talent or ambition or both are free to rise as
high they aspire, and those without are free to plunge through
the threadbare safety net of privilege.
Yet
academics who study these things properly, not by anecdotal observation
but by population samples reduced to mathematical formulae, take
a different view. And Labour policy-makers, for all Tony Blair's
pre-election talk about 'breaking down the barriers that stop
people fulfilling their talent', know that data does not lie:
a combination of social, economic and education factors has actually
made Britain less meritocratic on their watch, not more so. Arguably,
most underlying causes of that trend derive from their own egalitarian
policies. But they are socialists at heart. You may be sure their
only response will make matters worse with more of the same.
What
do scientists tell us that is so troubling? First, that progress
towards social mobility is extra- ordinarily slow even when it
is in a positive direction. A recent study of two centuries of
data by sociologists at Cardiff and Southampton found that while
British society is in simple terms twice as mobile as it was 100
years ago, 'it is likely to take another 220-250 years before
there is no association between 'fathers' and 'sons' occupational
and social positions'. And by then they might have added, our
descendants may be more worried about the mobility of melting
glaciers and daleks that about issues of class.
Secondly,
much more worryingly, work published last month for the Sutton
Trust by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin of the LSE's
Centre for Economic Performance suggests that the trend has actually
gone into reverse. Their
study found a significantly lower degree of 'inter-generational
mobility' (measured not by subjective class indicators such as
speech patterns and golf club memberships, but simply by income
levels) in Britain compared with Canada, the Nordic countries
or Germany. Britain and the United States exhibit similar levels
of mobility, but in the US the situation is more or less static
over time, whereas here mobility has actually decreased.
Comparing
'cohorts' born in 1958 and 1970, the study finds that the older
of the two groups - those who embarked on their adult lives at
the beginning of the Thatcher era - had the better chance of migrating
by their own efforts to a higher income group than that to which
they were born. The younger group - whose career paths started
in the recession of the early 1990s and continued into the bright
new dawn of Tony Blair - turned out to be less mobile, both upwards
and downwards: those with high-income parents more likely to have
stayed in a high-income bracket themselves.
The
LSE focuses the blame on education. 'Part of the reason for this
decline in mobility has been the increasing relationship between
family income and educational attainment ... This was because
additional opportunities to stay in education at both age 16 and
age 18 disproportionately benefited those from better-off backgrounds.
Analysis
of a third and younger cohort, born in the late 1970s and early
1980s, showed ' a narrowing of the gap between the staying-on
rates at 16 between rich and poor children, but a further widening
of the gap at 18'. Bearing in mind Government's target that by
2010, 50% of all young people should go on to higher education,
perhaps the most telling statistic is this one: the proportion
of people from the poorest fifth of society who get a degree rose
in the past generation from 6% to 9%, but for the wealthiest fifth
it has risen from 20% to 46%. That can readily be confirmed, in
my experience, by encounters with the student population of universities
such as Newcastle, now full of cheerful public-school types who
divide their time between nightclubs and Countryside Alliance
demos.
So
Government is well on the way to hitting its target for the stratum
that it least wants or needs to help. T he LSE team is forced
to conclude that 'the big expansion in university participation
has reinforced immobility across generations'. Government response
has been perhaps the purest of all examples of New Labour at work.
Does
anyone seriously doubt, for example, that A-level standards have
been progressively dumbed down - partly to create the illusion
of ever-improving results, partly because, in the face of union
hostility, it is too troublesome to weed out the worst teachers
and incentivise the best ones? State-sector teaching has effectively
abandoned pursuit of excellence in favour of an egalitarian standard
of mediocrity which every pupil can reach. Indeed, mention of
academic excellence runs straight into the ideological no-go barrier
of selection.
What
does Education Secretary Ruth Kelly have to say about that? 'Comprehensive
schools have -- done well for many but do not seem to have been
the universal engine of social mobility and equality that (their
inventor Antony) Crosland hoped they would be ... This does not
mean we should return to selection, nor will we.'
Why
not, Secretary of State? What's wrong with giving brighter pupils
from poorer homes a better chance to make the most of their talents
by enabling them to learn among other pupils of similar ability
and aspiration? Look at the example of Northern Ireland where
- despite the efforts of former education minister Martin McGuinness
to abolish them - grammar schools still flourish, and last summer
produced GCSE results across the province that were 10% better
(measured by A to C Grades achieved) than those in England.
Labour's answer to this embarrassment is not to learn the lesson
it offers but to abolish Northern Ireland's 11-plus selection
test: as Michael Howard said in a speech at the Belfast Royal
Academy in October: "The reality is that ours is a country
where people are being held back by politicians who are stoking
the politics of envy."
That
is the key to this government's attitude to education. What was
Gordon Brown's notorious intervention in 2000 in the case of Laura
Spence, a comprehensive pupil who was turned down at Magdalen
College, Oxford, if not a crude appeal to class envy? British
Universities are now beset by 'access targets', monitored by an
'access regulator' described last year by Michael Beloff, President
of Trinity College, Oxford, as 'the least popular public official
since the post of public hangman became redundant'.
Despite
strenuous efforts to comply, Oxford undershot its target for state
school entrants last year by 20% and faced a consequent threat
of funding cuts. It is now talking seriously of going independent
- which with a well-endowed American-style scholarship scheme
might actually make it more accessible rather than less, but is
the opposite of what the government wants. And as the LSE report
observes, the introduction of university top-up fees will add
to the disincentives for poorer applicants - though no doubt the
government is ready to deal with that by raising the 'access targets'
and accusing the universities of elitism.
And
what other aids to self-improvement do New Labour's gurus have
in mind? We learned at the weekend that Lord Giddens, Tony Blair's
intellectual mentor, the very inventor of the Third Way, is about
to make the case (in a book called The New Egalitarianism)
for increases in inheritance and capital transfer tax, in order
to equalise the next generation's life chances in the most confiscatory
way. That would certainly have an impact on mobility statistics,
by making it tougher for children of the wealthiest stratum to
remain there in later life.
The
proposal would be so unpopular with middle-class voters that it
is highly unlikely to happen. But in any case it's hard to see
how it would encourage the lower strata, Labour's core constituency,
to haul themselves upwards. Those whose motivation is to accumulate
capital to pass on to their own children would be directly discouraged.
But perhaps that would not trouble this government so long as
the statistics looked better. And perhaps, in the darkest dungeons
of Downing Street there are pollsters cynical enough to point
out that too much upward mobility would create a whole new generation
of Thatcherites, who would hasten the demise of New Labour.
The
only government iniative since the election which might do something
to help mobility is Gordon Brown's shared ownership scheme to
help first-time house-buyers who have been priced 0ut of the market.
The right of council-house tenants to
buy their homes at discounted prices, introduced by Margaret Thatcher
in 1980, was probably the greatest single blow for upward mobility
in modern times. Labour did not like that one either.
If the Chancellor fulfils his pledge to help 100,000 families
on to the housing ladder during this Parliament, he will also
offered them an upward route on our social snakes-and-ladders
board, because home ownership confers a certain solidity of personal
circumstances - and barring market crashes, financial security
- which can only improve the chances of future betterment.
There
is another factor which confers the solidity on which springboards
can be built, but again it is one to which this government seems
reluctant to do more than pay faint lip service edged about with
political correctness: stable family life, possibly even extending
to marriage. As Ferdinand Mount wrote in Mind the Gap (2004),
his study of 'the new class divide in Britain': "The state
has progressively eroded to vanishing point the married couple's
tax allowance and removed almost all other preferential treatment
for the married state ........ This is clearly insane."
And
so it is. The point is not a moralistic one about matrimony but
a statistical one about the likelihood of a family remaining together
as a unit throughout a child's years in education. Loving parents,
financial security, good teachers, challenging examinations, healthy
competition and worthwhile incentives are what any child needs
to make the most of natural ability and start to climb the anthill
of life. In the modern world, what he or she does not need is
a cut-glass accent or a command of bourgeois etiquette; Jamie
Oliver is today's ultimate upwardly mobile (and notably uxorious)
role model. That iss unreservedly to be welcomed, but the attention
the media give to success stories such as his has deceived us
into thinking that they illustrate a wider trend.
They
do not and thanks in large part to New Labour's spinelessness
and misplaced egalitarianism, most of Jamie's classmates are condemned
to a life in which, as of old, 'disadvantage reinforces itself
across the generations'. That last phrase, by the way, is a quotation
from Stephen Byers in 2003: there could hardly be a clearer admission
of failure.
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