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‘It was a complete emblem to me of the problem that these are people who are so well-paid that they do not experience public services, they have a private health scheme at Channel 4, they do not experience state education, they do not travel on public transport, they live in a cocoon completely on their own, and this separates them dramatically from the day-to-day experience of the whole of the rest of the population, and particularly those outside of London.’
‘It was a complete emblem to me of the problem that these are people who are so well-paid that they do not experience public services, they have a private health scheme at Channel 4, they do not experience state education, they do not travel on public transport, they live in a cocoon completely on their own, and this separates them dramatically from the day-to-day experience of the whole of the rest of the population, and particularly those outside of London.’
It is profoundly irrational for so much wealth and power to be concentrated in so few hands.
It is profoundly irrational for so much wealth and power to be concentrated in so few hands.
Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages. After all, in the abstract it would seem irrational that through an accident of birth, some should rise to the top while others remain trapped at the bottom.
Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages. After all, in the abstract it would seem irrational that through an accident of birth, some should rise to the top while others remain trapped at the bottom.
Welfare fraud is estimated to cost the Treasury around £1 billion a year. But, as detailed investigations by chartered accountant Richard Murphy have found, £70 billion is lost through tax evasion every year—that is, seventy times more.
As the 1970s drew to a close, before the Thatcher government launched the ‘right-to-buy’ scheme, more than two in five of us lived in council housing.
as Karen Matthews’s mother put it: ‘The town has changed now. The textiles have gone and there aren’t the same jobs as there were.’41 Manufacturing in areas like Dewsbury Moor used to provide secure, relatively well-paid, highly unionized jobs that were passed down from generation to generation.
‘The decline of the British manufacturing and industrial base has decimated communities up and down the country,’ says Labour MP Katy Clark. ‘If you just talk about the constituency I represent [North Ayrshire and Arran], we used to have large-scale industrial and manufacturing industries which employed on occasion tens of thousands of people. All those jobs have gone and in their place, low-paid usually service-sector and public-sector jobs have come.’
In late 2008, the government announced plans to push 3.5 million benefit recipients into jobs. At the same time they estimated that there were only around half a million vacancies.
demonizing the less well-off also makes it easier to justify an unprecedented and growing level of social inequality.
any talk about class is subversive for a host of reasons. It implies that one group possesses wealth and power in society, while others do not. If you accept that much, it is only a step to concluding that this is something that needs to be rectified. It suggests that a group of people live by working for others, which raises questions of exploitation.
demagoguery
Thatcherism was fostering a new culture where success was measured by what you owned. Those who did not adapt were to be despised. Aspiration was no longer about people working together to improve their communities; it was being redefined as getting more for yourself as an individual, regardless of the social costs.
Thatcher was determined to deal with the symptoms of her scorched-earth economic policies, not the causes.
In this spirit, a government report published in December 2008 highlighted the alleged ‘under-ambition’ of working-class people living in the old industrial heartlands. The question of what these kids are supposed to aspire to in areas lacking well-paid jobs is never addressed.
That £16 billion worth of benefits were in fact going unclaimed each year—around two and half times the amount of money the government was trying to save—went unmentioned.
Purnell was presenting work as an automatic gateway out of poverty but, in low-pay Britain, that’s hardly the case.
After all, we live in a country where the top decile pay less tax as a proportion of income than the bottom decile.
