Michael Meacher MP

It would be unfair to call Cameron’s Big Society a “total bollocks”, as one senior Conservative did during the election campaign because it was too vague to mean anything.   Cameron himself would have us believe it is a project, to be launched in November, to harness the power of online social networking via a new Your Square Mile website to turn sceptical citizens into enthusiastic community organisers.   After the Thatcher decade lionised individuals and rolled back the State, the Big Society provides the positive counterfoil of joining individuals together to take community action.   Or does it? (more…)

Arguably the most telling characteristic of any society is the degree of inequality.   In Britain’s case it has not only grown in the last two decades to previously unheard-of dimensions, it has even spawned a new social class system and deconstructed the whole concept of aspiration and social mobility.   It has made the facile division of Britain into working class/middle class or Middle England versus the rest wholly otiose.   That does not begin to reflect the ugly social reality of UK 2010.

The distinctive features of the social landscape are no longer the gradual assimilation of an upwardly mobile working class into a broad-tent middle class, but rather the distinctive polarisation at either end of the spectrum into extremes of alienation.   Richard Lambert, president of the CBI no less, has recently referred to the gargantuan greed and bonuses of the hyper-wealthy, perhaps 1-2% of the population, as marking them out as aliens.   (more…)

So class now returns to the political agenda – 30 years after Thatcher sharply widened class divisions, fatened the rich and trebled child poverty, and a decade after New Labour promised to halve child poverty but actually widened inequality still further and only reduced child poverty by a fifth. The depressing truth is that both parties have pursued a neoliberal economy of unfettered market forces, privatisation and deregulation, all of which sharply drive up inequality and both parties reject redistribution beyond minimalist tinkering. The inevitable result is that child poverty in Britain is now the fourth highest in the EU, the rich are now richer compared with the rest of the population than they have ever been since Edwardian times, 17 million people (more than a quarter of all households) remain on benefit, while chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies are now paid on average about 155 times more than the average paid worker. So class matters, yes, it matters dreadfully, it always has. And Harriet Harman is right to say today: “class overarches discrimination from gender race or disability”.

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If John Bercow discovered sex and New Labour at the same time, as some Tory wags wouold have it, New Labour is now discovering class and elections at the same time, though it’s almost certainly too late. But Alan Milburn’s thesis on reversing Britain’s declining social mobility, published today, is still interesting in highlighting one of this country’s major problems, namely the widening abyss in aspiration and performance between the classes. Pity is however that New Labour, with its emphasis on unbridled markets and ballooning inequality, has played a large part in creating the problem in the first place, and is not exactly best placed to resolve the problem now. Even so, Milburn’s strictures deserve attention: would they create a more open and fairer channel for talent from whatever provenance it comes?

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