Why I Write

My day job involves running large surveys of public attitudes to the welfare state. Sounds boring? Not necessarily. The big change you notice, over time and also comparing Britain with other advanced countries is that attitudes here have become more individualist. People are generally keen on the big public services, the ones that cost lots of money, like the NHS, state pensions and the education system. They’re much less keen on benefits or services directed at the poor, those on low wages or on zero-hours contracts or unemployed. They also don’t like paying tax, and don’t realize how much the tax burden has shifted away from income tax (better off people pay a higher proportion of their income in income tax) and towards VAT (those on low incomes pay the highest proportion of income in VAT).
When you ask people why they look at the world in the way they do, there are two kinds of answers. First, they don’t trust politicians or policy-makers or anyone really with ideas about how society should be organized. They don’t want people to meddle and that means a world of the lowest common denominator, where people get what they earn and pay for what they have and that’s it.
The other reason is that many people don’t think very much about what you might call the ‘public realm’ or ‘the community’ or society. In a project I’m currently running we ask groups of 30 or 40 people to hammer out what they’d like the welfare state to be like for their children’s generation in extended discussions over two or three days. There are experts on hand to provide ideas or facts, but only if people ask for them.
Everyone is aware how hard it is for young people to pay for college or university, to get access to decent housing through private renting and virtually impossible to buy a house without a lot of help, and to get a secure job and hold it down. Very few people think in terms of collective interventions by government department or local councils or agencies like trade unions or community groups. So what’s the answer?
It’s not cut the fees and pay for the colleges and universities through tax or get councils to build a lot of housing using cheap government loans or pass laws to give people greater rights at work or get the government to invest to create more jobs. It’s much more often: help people help themselves: more training and more university places so young people can get better qualifications and get on – compete better with each other. And that’s it.
The world that people think about and which limits their opportunities to work out what to do in society has become steadily narrower, more concerned with me and my family and anyone else is somewhere beyond my concerns. All my solutions are about how me and mine can get ahead.
I’ve written this up in academic books which get read and discussed by other academics who have all sorts of bright ideas about how the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the rise of newly developed economies in the global market and the decline of manufacturing industry from about half (in 1955) to about 10 per cent of the economy play a part, but none of this goes anywhere.
So I’ve started on novels. Writing a novel is the most testing experience I’ve had. It involves imaging a world run purely on market principles, in which everyone is a complete individualist, caring only for their own interests and bargaining for everything. Such a society could function and grow. It would be very unequal and it would require strong laws – but it would work. The point is of course that things we take for granted, that link us together – trust, empathy, love - would be outlawed. Life would not be recognizably human. People would have to work hard to stand still, but it would never be clear what the point was, apart from doing better than somebody else.
That’s what I’ve tried to portray in my new novel, ‘The Baby Auction’.