It is ironic, with the vision thing now raising its head again as the political parties jostle ever closer together, how much they struggle to find their own distinct visionary USP. The truth is that over the last 30 years an earthquake has reconstructed the contours of political space in Britain, leaving the parties nestling round its epicentre and large tracts of the outer landscape deserted and isolated. A vision that matches the real political needs of contemporary Britain will not be created until that deserted territory is convincingly re-occupied.
Britain today is composed broadly of three distinct classes. The first is those dependent on benefit, numbering some 17 millions, plus the marginally employed scraping by on bottom-level wages, intermittent work, or temporary, part-time or agency jobs, perhaps another 5 million. They are characterised by chronic economic insecurity, with incomes fluctuating below £250 a week. Second are the majority of the population clustered around the national average income of £420 a week, from skilled manual through technical, clerical, administrative grades to lower managerial and professional jobs. They number some 32 million, their employment is generally secure, and their incomes range from £250-800 a week. The third class are the well-off and the rich – senior managers, directors, top professionals, and financiers – who number around 6 millions and whose incomes average over £1,000 a week, with a lifestyle often demonstrating status, power and wealth. Within this small class is the key sub-set of the super-rich representing some 0.1% of the population whose annual incomes range from £ ½ – 10 millions plus. This is where the real power is concentrated.
The rhetoric of all the political parties claims that they are focussed on the ‘centre ground’, sometimes equally bemusingly referred to as Middle England. Yet their actions and policies don’t indicate that at all. Rather they are fixated on the interests and concerns of the dominant class in society, leaving more than half the population effectively disenfranchised and unrepresented.
This lop-sided political framework is directly responsible for the meagreness of the vision that is so depressing an aspect of the political culture today. The dominant ideology is the neo-liberal economic agenda of current Western capitalism – privatisation, de-regulation, globalisation, so-called flexible labour markets, and unabashed inequality. These are the emblems and instruments of the super-rich class, and so long as all the political parties assiduously court this basic philosophy and do not prioritise instead the interests of the majority, there will be no vision.
A vision will only resonate if it reflects the unmet needs and unrealised aspirations of major classes in society. In Britain today that means championing causes that have either become taboo subjects or marginalised extras.
The first is the distribution of power. Power is now held more unequally than at any time since the 1930s. Britain is now run essentially by private deals secretly undertaken between No.10 and business leaders in industry, finance and the media, with the security services playing a much larger role behind the scenes than is commonly recognised. The last thirty years particularly have seen power draining upwards to the largest corporations and to Downing Street, leaving Parliament and even the Cabinet increasingly sidelined. The biggest businesses, so far from being closely regulated in the public interest, have increasingly harnessed State power for their own commercial ends against the interests of the wider community. The loosening of controls over major power station, airport and incinerator developments, the failure to regulate unhealthy food advertising despite the dangerous growth of obesity, the withdrawal of the SFO investigation into corruption allegations against BAE, and the relaxation of the gaming laws to permit a flood of gambling casinos are just a few recent examples.
The checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power have all but collapsed. Civil liberties have been drastically eroded, and the introduction of ID cards and 3-month detention without charge are still being mooted. Workers who have been in their job less than two years can be arbitrarily dismissed without any rights, and temporary and agency workers remain an exploited underclass. Accountability, or indeed any redress, against alleged misdemeanours by police, judges, banks, private utilities or big corporations generally is almost non-existent. Today powerlessness is widely felt to be endemic throughout society, and it will require an awful lot more than focus groups or citizens’ juries to overcome it.
The second scandal that cries out to be dealt with is inequality which has now reached grotesque levels. A worker on the minimum wage is now paid £200 a week whilst his boss, if he works for one of the top 100 FTSE companies, is now paid £55,290 a week, 276 times more. With private equity excesses, capital and business taxation the lowest for a century, and both direct and indirect taxes highly regressive, we are back to the income-polarised class system of the Edwardian era.
There will be no vision to excite political action unless this unfettered greed of private power is brought to heel. This might involve a Pay Commission established to set down guidelines, backed up by tax sanctions, for what is a reasonable range of pay from top to bottom, with incentives applied consistently and fairly across the range. Equally, people should be asked if they think it right that in all large and medium-sized organisations representatives of all the main grades from the boardroom to the cleaners should, at an annual meeting, have to justify the pay claims they are making at the expense of potential pay increases for all other grades. And if people do think that right, implementing it would inspire a vision of real fairness unmatched by all the rhetoric today.
A third component for a vision to redress the slide into privatised power and money must be the restoration of the high ideal of public service. Currently, putting some of the largest US healthcare corporations in charge of commissioning the bulk of NHS services and spreading privately sponsored academies throughout the education system has, on all the empirical evidence, much more to do with market dogma and business lobbying than with improving performance on the ground. Equally, cutting Council house-building to just 200 a year (it was 14,000 in Thatcher’s last year), insisting on owner occupation as the keystone for government action when a quarter of the population can never afford it, privatising the probation service and other parts of the criminal justice system, and outsourcing local government to private Strategic Services Development Partnerships are undermining the whole ideal of public service – its accountability, equity, universality, professionalism, and altruism – which underpins the best of British society. The time for a counter-revolution here is now.
Class is everywhere redolent throughout Britain today, and these three goals would address it. But a fourth – making a world that is safe and sustainable for our children – is overriding and would inspire all classes. Yet government clearly does not accord it the centrality it deserves. Once again the power of the old vested interests obtrudes, which explains why preference is given to tripling airport capacity, promoting a third runway at Heathrow, undermining EU renewable energy targets, cancelling a requirement on the top thousand companies to report annually on their carbon emissions, and deferring household carbon allowances. This is so short-sighted. The fight against engulfing climate change is so imperative that it must rapidly transform the global economy towards a non-fossil fuels civilisation. A government that genuinely displayed world leadership here, in action not just in rhetoric, could arouse a positive political appeal that would be overwhelming. Are we ready?
This article appeared in Tribune on 15 December 2007.
