There was an article in the Sunday Herald in Glasgow yesterday, by the financial journalist Ian Fraser, whose book on RBS is due for publication shortly. It reported on some of the events of the Edinburgh Book Festival with an economic slant, including mine. It quotes me being staggeringly optimistic:
"This is the calm before the storm. Given the poverty of the current political and economic arrangements - and our own understanding of the way things actually work - I believe that change is about to happen. If we meet again here in five years' time, there will be a different political spirit abroad. There will be a much greater focus on finding ways for our children and our children's children to live meaningful, interesting, comfortable lives away from the tyranny of landlords and employers."
That is indeed what I said, among other things about the decline of the middle classes, relating to my book Broke – and the peculiar upside down notion of kick-starting the economy with Help to Buy. A bit like looking after today by devouring your children.
A couple of people came up to me afterwards to ask me why I was so optimistic that change was coming, given that politics has become so stuck.
The answer is, I suppose, that I believe in human ingenuity. My reason for believing that new economic solutions are emerging is partly because I can see them – the emerging entrepreneurial energy, the rise of the employee mutuals, the growing understanding that the current banking dispensation is actively corroding our wealth.
It is also partly the opposite. Conventional economic thinking is so disconnected from the real world, so devoid of purpose, so empty of demonstrable success; the idea that wealth will trickle down rather than hoover up is so bereft of evidence.
Even the most conventional policy-makers will find that it sticks in their throats.
The third reason why I’m optimistic is that the middle classes are waking from their long dream, understanding that the economic destruction visited on the working classes is now in store for them – understanding the futures their children face: 25 years indentured servitude to their mortgage provider, in jobs they loathe, paying out such vast sums to tyrannical landlords in the interim that they can't quite manage to bring up families of their own.
What the middle classes want, they will eventually get. When they understand the dark future ahead – and the slow corrosion of UK life as our lives become unaffordable – they will create a political force capable of tackling it.
Every generation or so, UK politics generates a radical shift. It did so in 1906, in 1940, in 1979. It is now 34 years since the last one and we are due another. It will happen sooner than we think.
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5 comments:
You are indeed an optimist!
I wish I could agree with you. But I think there are far too many middle class people whose attention is fixed on the little enemy in front of them, whose depredations take place in full view, to the exclusion of the much more dangerous enemy behind them, whose depredations are hidden, no doubt being secret or commercially confidential.
Unless that changes, the middle classes are, as you point out, doomed. But so much of their self-esteem comes from identifying with those above them in the social scale, and distancing themselves from those below, that such change is almost impossible.
The first sign of that change would surely be a falling concern with immigration and benefits eligibility compared with financial and employment reform away from neo-liberalism. What sign is there of this?
«middle classes are waking from their long dream, understanding that the economic destruction visited on the working classes is now in store for them – understanding the futures their children face: 25 years indentured servitude to their mortgage provider, in jobs they loathe, paying out such vast sums to tyrannical landlords in the interim that they can't quite manage to bring up families of their own.»
Ohi, that's just people like you who did not get theirs, and therefore struggle to live the life they feel entitled to, of a gentleman squire in London on an artist-style job.
The vast majority of the middle classes are property owners, and got theirs, and many of their children expect to inherit from their grandparents and parents a property portfolio that will sort them out.
As BruceK writes well, until their dream of being part of the upper classes as propertied gentry ends as it will, like in Ireland or Iceland or Spain, they won't listen to anything.
«much more dangerous enemy behind them, whose depredations are hidden»
It is not at all hidden: it was very well publicized that various finance bailout cost hundreds of billions of pounds, plus all the various PPI, public procurement deals, etc. are very well known.
But all that money is for deserving "wealth creators", not for the profiteers who live it large on unemployment money.
More precisely the PR agencies that help shape conservative messages are based on a well know fact of psychology: that most people only compare themselves to people in similar circumstances, and don't bother comparing to people much richer than themselves.
«concern with immigration and benefits eligibility»
Note that these are *working class* concerns.
The tory middle classes, those who got theirs, have very different concerns: they want far more immigration, and they want much lower benefits, not lower immigration and less competition for benefits.
Because the tory middle classes who got theirs know very well that more immigration and lower benefits drive down wages and drive up house prices, two things they care a lot about.
Usual note: as always the above applies south of the Watford Gap. Northern voters, middle class or otherwise, don't matter.
Oi, Blissex! Who are you calling a gentleman squire in London? Me?
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