Tsars And Social Mobility

So Mr. Alan Milburn is to be Tsar of Social Mobility. Historically, Tsars do not have a good record for administrative effectiveness or social mobility. This is why the Russians got rid of them and before then assassinated a few. Putting Alan in charge is roughly like appointing Dr. Harold Shipman to head up Age Concern but perhaps I am defaming the medical profession.

Social mobility occurs when the economy grows at a rate greater than that of the population in conditions where significant structural change occurs. This means real growth and real change and not artificially induced fixes of the figures for political reasons.

We are told that the financial sector has greatly increased in importance. This is concentrated in the South East and we hear loud wails from its chieftains that huge wages and bonuses are necessary to attract the best and brightest of the world to extract more from our economy to bet on its products.

It seems to me that if you bring in a lot of people from elsewhere into the highest paid jobs in our economy somehow this will reduce opportunities for the native population (me, my family and my relatives). If their profits and incomes have the effect of reducing ours this will exacerbate the effect. We are less likely to stay free from debt or to accumulate capital or savings.

As a person with a beady eye for the realities of history I have to point out that in the past a good deal of the social mobility of the UK occurred amongst the males. The females mostly were engaged in marriage, child bearing and certainly in the higher classes did not have paid employment. Sometimes they married below their station which could bring up their sons a peg or two. Sometimes, higher, and then pulling up other members of their family.

When we went for Equality this has had the effect of putting virtually all the upper and middle class females into the employment market in direct competition with males at entry level and junior management. Although at the topmost levels we may then find a relative shortage of females there are only a small number of those jobs.

At the middling and supervisory levels, however, the lower rungs of the ladder are occupied by many more females and I suspect largely from the middling or upper orders. In short, for your average male, depending on the extent of economic expansion there can be proportionately less room in times of growth and a lot less in times of reduced activity or contraction.

You will be very tired of me telling that in the old days chaps used to start at the lowest levels, then work there way up by part time study over many years. Today, however you need a degree, largely by full time study away from home. This is both too great a cost for many and a significant disincentive for others who would rather be in work than sitting around classrooms to little real purpose.

More and more often you need a second degree for the better opportunities. Added to that in some spheres, notably the media or entertainment, you are faced with long periods of zero income and dependence on others.

Unluckily, for native males starting at the bottom has become less easy as well. If the rate of immigration exceeds the rate of growth and the extent of employment legislation and regulation impacts heavily on job recruitment then both native males and females from lower income families will be up against it. When quota systems for balancing ethnicity result in recruitment excluding native males or females from many areas in the public sector, then even the bottom rungs of the ladder cannot be taken by many of the lower orders.

There is another complication as well. Once you worked until you dropped, now we have the notion of “retirement”. It could take some years to work your way up and seniority in status often coincided with age. Today, our irresponsibility in the way early retirement is dealt with has allowed a large proportion of the work force to be dumped out in their 50’s and recently in their 40’s.

Consequently, there are many to who lose the chance to make the final stages and I suspect this may impact on many whose origins are amongst the less wealthy a great deal more than on others. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that all the people ending work at or around 50 could impact on social mobility but it is one factor amongst many.

So all the talk of increasing social mobility in real terms is just that. In order to allow this then we have to hugely increase the rate of real economic growth against all the odds and forecasts. Moreover, we have to do this with the existing population if those people are to have any chance of mobility.

The only way to deal with the present situation is to change the world as it is. There is not much chance of this in terms of growth. But we can no longer go back to the near past or any time when social mobility was greater. New means will be necessary or perhaps old ones with an ancient tradition.

I am thinking of establishing a war band in my own area and if I can persuade other war bands to accept my leadership as a Warlord we could be in business. What I can promise, for the survivors, is social mobility on a scale undreamed of in the recent past.

Anyone interested?

A Grand Day Out

Today I went fishing the easy way, by going to the fish shop and asking the fishmonger to do the necessary. As old fashioned fishmongers have gone from almost all our shopping centres you now have to travel some miles. Our nearest is on the coast a forty minute belt down the motorway. We like to eat fish to promote our “green” credentials” The trouble is that fish stocks are now getting low and the price is going up and all sorts of other things so it is no longer “green”.

We took a walk along the seafront. To the south we could see Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, now mostly mothballed, and there is a debate about its renewal. If it is not renewed it will add to the energy problem, if it is it will be the source of other problems. Close to it we could just pick out the huge Romney Marsh Wind Farm, built to provide us with “clean” power. We could see them easily because the sails were not turning as there was no wind.

Adjacent to the power station and wind farms is Lydd Airport. Its owners want to expand it to allow bigger planes and a more extensive air service. This will entail other works. At the moment it offers a world class service to Le Touquet where the French Elite once used to keep their mistresses. Now it has some attractive casinos. Just the kind of thing to support our GDP in peril.

Up to the north the P&O Ferries are working hard out of Dover. They need to in order to keep up with the traffic created by all the strikes in France. There are two large new ferries on order. They hoped to name them “Olympic Spirit” and “Olympic Pride” to celebrate the coming of the Olympic Games to England.

They are not able to. It seems that the use of the word “Olympic” now contravenes legal rules that protect the commercial rights of the organisers of the Olympic Games. As the UK government whose idea this is has not consulted Zeus or his staff I suspect that something unexpected and nasty could happen in 2012.

Despite it being a beautiful day there are not many people around and it is all sad and more than tired. The British seaside does not attract many these days. People have been instructed that they must fly off across the world to be stranded in far away places and sit on beaches and in bars indistinguishable from any others to enjoy themselves.

However, there were two chaps enjoying themselves with their tins and jolly banter echoing around the promenade. It did not take long for me to deduce that they were Glaswegians from the nature and verbal texture of the exchanges as we greeted each other. A short distance away there is a road named after a Glaswegian of great fame, Sir John Moore, and the whole township celebrates his name and memory. Behind us was the great Shorncliffe Redoubt that he built two hundred years ago.

The Glaswegians, old soldiers, it appeared were not in work and homeless, so I invited them to join me in invading France, whose coast was just possible to see. They demurred, they had already tried it and had been thrown out by the French in a sad betrayal of European solidarity.

Sadly, my new friends would not be voting, like many of their ilk. But in their old homes their votes would not be missed being replaced by new postal votes as in so many places. It is one of the wonders of New Labour that the number of fake votes provided by ineligible non European Afghans and Iraqi men will far exceed the number of British troops prevented from voting by administrative difficulties. Sir John Moore would not have understood.

Having advised the two about the location of a decent fish and chip shop and how easy it is to slip out through the back door of the local Waitrose store, it was time to come home. On the way back we were suddenly overtaken by a stream of large expensive limousines doing the ton in the fast lane.

One of my obsessive traits is to work out the meaning of number plates. This lot were off the train from Brussels and headed for London. Does this mean that come Friday there will be a posse of Eurocrats and others on hand to take part in any discussions about power broking or personalities in any new regime?

The only thing that made sense today was the conversation with the Glaswegians.

Social Mobility - Dodgems and Roller Coasters

When politicians say that they want more social mobility then they should be careful what they wish for. Social mobility might go up or down. The 19th Century may have allowed a good deal of upward movement but undoubtedly there was a great deal downward, one of the effects of large families with a higher proportion of children surviving than in the past.

Our problem is to insist on basing our ideas of what is the two dimensional perspective of the notional class structure imposed by statisticians and the belief that this is somehow rigid and mechanical in its workings.

I regret that reality, as ever, is chaotic, very complicated and subject to all the chance and unpredictable fortunes, or not, of life. It is not just swings and roundabouts, it is roller coasters and dodgems and all the rest. Take the happy family above, for example. This is Mark Mac Donnell, 10th Earl of Antrim, his Countess, Jane Emma Hannah and their family. The present Earl does not use his title much, as a businessman it can get in the way of his work.

Mark, however, was very happy to become Earl. Initially, a younger son sent into the navy he was going to have to make his own way in life. His wife was the daughter of an Army Cavalry Major, Turner Macan of Carriff in County Armagh, one of a minor Ulster gentry family who went to India to make his name and fortune. Carriff is now a garden centre.

Mark and Jane with their growing family at one time could hope only for a modest prosperity that would allow them to educate and place their children. By one of those quirks of Irish politics in the late 18th Century the 6th Earl secured in Letters Patent the reversion of the Earldom of Antrim to the female line in the event of no male heir. So Mark was plucked from the Quarter Deck in 1855 to take over the title and estates of the Earldom and the name Mac Donnell.

This was much to his surprise as he had two elder brothers, both of whom died early and childless. They had succeeded their mother who before that her eldest sister, and then their father who had secured the special favour of a female descent for his title. Mark and Jane had risen in the world.

But there was more to come. The later Antrim’s were at Court at the turn of the 19th and 20th Century. One, Lady Jane Grey Mac Donnell, who left a private printed memoir in 1938, married Lord Clinton, Aide and Secretary to the Prince of Wales. Their daughter Fenella, married John Herbert Bowes-Lyon in 1914. He had a rather younger sister Elizabeth and the rest, as they say, is history.

But this is just one small part of the family. Some of the other descendants and connections are strewn about Burke and Debrett, Home, Lichfield, Bicester and others. But many are not. Where are the rest of them? The vast majority have gone off the radar to be found only by grubbing away in the ordinary records. As you go down the years so also you go down the scale of status and income. It is possible to connect both Wayne Rooney and Cherie Booth-Blair to the late Queen Mother. I did say roller coaster, didn’t I?

As for us ordinary lot, even within the limitations of the ups and downs of our own families there is a rise and fall. You start one thing, become another, get lucky or unlucky, make right or wrong decisions, back the right or wrong enterprises, make the right or wrong friends and networks and it will be different. This does not allow for health matters. One day it is all go, the next it all changes.

One of my uncles went into hospital work and for career reasons in the late 1930’s chose an Isolation Hospital. He caught TB and died young. Had he survived, he might well have become a senior figure in the National Health Service in the 1950’s. I could go round all the branches of my family and plot the ups and downs of life.

There is one key difference today however and that is Education. In the past in the Lower and Upper reaches of the middling orders, the pump house of social mobility, it was possible to move up without a great deal in the way of formal education. If anything around much of commerce and industry there was a prejudice against graduates. Work was the university of life.

Nowadays, unluckily, we are virtually at the point where is it compulsory to have a degree and to be in formal Education until the age of 21 at least to obtain the equivalent of entry clerical post. In short, the Education system and the way it is managed and used has become the major obstruction to social mobility.

It is not so much old fashioned class or money that matters but how long and where you were educated. You now often need a post graduate education to become the sort of very junior manager that my uncle was seventy years ago. As lotteries of life go, this is even worse than any of the former obstacles and hurdles.

No wonder that the ambition of so many girls is to become models and footballer’s WAG’s. At least it shows respect for the older traditions of social mobility.

Drink And The Devil - Buckfast And Loose

Sprawled out on my couch necking a bottle of Chateau Latour 1961 somehow or another I started BBC 1 Scotland about the scourge of Buckfast Tonic Wine (15%) north of the Border. There is a note of resentment in this, because it is clear that they are drinking my share as well as their own, not satisfied with drinking nearly as much vodka as the Russians, or as much Stella as the Belgians.

It is possible that the declamations against the drink owe as much to the views of John Knox about the religious orders as the scientific evidence. There was clear proof offered that if you smash a bottle, the remaining top can inflict nasty injuries. I recall much the same was found of filed down bicycle chains long ago.

The “proof” came from the University College of Polmont. OK, at present it is a young offenders penal establishment, but doubtless will be rebadged soon to help the government meet its 50% university admission target. It seems that many of the chaps given to violence had been swigging Buckfast. Again I recall that when rugger chaps went on the razzle and did stupid things long ago they had often been on the Bucks Fizz, and nobody then blamed the champagne and stout companies.

However, there are other things. I believe that Buckie is sweet and does have a high caffeine content. As well as the alcohol there is sugar. Nobody mentioned sugar. Also it is made from a secret recipe. This means flavourings of one sort or another. Nobody mentioned the other stuff that could be in the mix. There are other things. The chaps on view were not I suspect gourmet eaters or eco-freaks. Possibly they were on a very solid diet of junk food. Need I say more? Some of the artificial flavourings, flavour enhancers (including MSG) and colourings do have brain impact. Not quite as much as a Glasgow Kiss perhaps, but they can give it a whack.

Besides alcoholic beverages the boys will have been drinking other wet things as well, fizzy drinks and energy drinks. There is some decidedly funny stuff in these and although sugar free, the sweetening agents can have nasty and unpredictable chemical effects. Moreover these days for the young there is almost a seamless transition from heavily promoted fizzy drinks to well advertised alcopops to the spirits and heavy duty stuff. Buckie is almost a statement of individual protest against the drinks establishment.

A heavy dose of Buckie may not be the only cause, just the final trigger element in a constitution already dosed up for irrational action. It is also cheap, which may explain why so many of those on benefits drink it. You will appreciate that here we have moved on from a simple basic explanation to a more complicated one which points not one finger but several at many of the most powerful commercial entities that supply and feed us, as well as making contributions to the personal welfare of so many politicians.

The monks are easy targets and fall guys. So blame them and look good with the spin but don’t mention the other matters. After all this and half an hour of football I started on the Chateau d’Yquem 1996 and took in Delia, the BBC food goddess. She can do things with pork chops that you would never believe. After her the second half of the Newcastle v West Brom game seemed small beer and a bottle of the Graham Port of 1955 was needed to carry me through.

At least I know how to control my intake. Does Waitrose stock Buckie, I wonder?

Temperance Is A Virtue

Frank Skinner, comedian, performer and a commentator on our times, has been temperance since 1986, when he realised that persistent heavy drinking was doing real damage. He has put his head above the parapet in support of the British Medical Association declaration that alcohol consumption is at levels that present serious health issues amongst increasing numbers of the population, of all ages. When I looked for a suitable image from the web it was serendipity that one showed a Band of Hope demonstration in Leek, Staffordshire, from 1907, with the Skinner name prominent above a shop.

Look closely, and you see that for a small town, it was a large demonstration. Into the early decades of the 20th Century, from small beginnings in the early 19th, the Movement had large followings across the Atlantic Isles, and complex and extensive organisation, albeit divided, too stratified, and given to spending too much time on obscure theological debates.

My personal acquaintance with Temperance organisations was a brief one. In the early 1950’s a jolly red headed girl with flashing blue eyes invited me and my friends to a social event in a local church hall. When we arrived there, we found that it was a GAY event; that is the Guild of Abstaining Youth, motto, you did not need to drink to be gay. In those days the word conveyed its original meaning in the provinces. Whilst it was for the most part an ordinary social occasion, unluckily, there was a price, an homily from a church elder on the virtues of temperance, intended to recruit us.

Even more unluckily, she chose to cite Gilbert Keith Chesterton as someone who would have done better sober. As I had read many of his works and she hadn’t, there was a debate she did not welcome. Worse still, it was apparent that before arriving we had been in the Marquis of Granby pub first a few doors away. We had been rugger training and we needed to restore our liquid balance with Shipstones Best Mild. We assumed we had lost a lot of liquid. The evening ended badly.

By this time the old Temperance Movement was in retreat for a variety of reasons, too much to go into here. One factor was that drinking was then much more under control than it had been in the past, especially in some towns where the local council, often with a strong Methodist element, limited the number of licences as much as possible. Not only were the outlets for the sale of drink reduced, with strict opening hours imposed, but the stuff itself was far from cheap. Spirits were very expensive, wines little known, and costly, as were the range of other stronger drinks. The beer was characteristically weaker, a legacy of two world wars. If your budget was limited to that, your stomach usually gave in long before the brain.

Added factors were that there was no credit of any kind, and working hours were a great deal longer. Saturday night was the only time available for many. As there was little interest in total prohibition, except for a small number of places which had exceptionally rigorous religious communities, the Movement lost impetus. Another factor was inevitably the media, films, TV and radio invariably portrayed drink as a necessary social skill, and temperance people as a miserable bunch. The distillers and brewers had quickly recognised the values of product placement.

In its time, the Movement had been a major agent of social reform, because it took in not only the interests of families, but critically of the children their health and education. It was very much an educational movement, and with an agenda of social interaction in an improving and positive community setting. It crossed class barriers, although with few of the upper classes much involved, they were not known as “The Beerage” for nothing.

It was that most shocking of things, a substantially lower middle and skilled working class supported form of political movement, which included those who did not get the vote until after 1865 in some cases and 1885 in most, with the women not voting until after 1918. We know a good deal about the leadership of the Movement from the works of Peter Turner Winskill (1834-1912). Although many academic historians turn up their noses at him, no discernable Marxist ideas, if his work is checked in detail it holds up. He was an Iron Moulder by trade, before taking on senior duties in the Movement. At its peak, the Movement numbered millions, gave a commitment and non-alcoholic full social life, and further education in skills and trades to many.

One of the main planks of the Temperance Movement was the claim that the drinks trade was not a free market in the way it worked. It was common in some trades for wages to be paid only in a public house. It was often a part of the job to drink with others. In many cases, beer was a great deal safer than the water or anything else. The pub trade was increasingly in the hands of the brewers, and they relentlessly expanded the number of outlets. Regulation was a matter of a battle for control over the freedom of people to decide for themselves.

Today, all we have is the medical and health lobby, AA and support groups with a few cheerleaders, and rare individuals like Frank Skinner to ask the awkward questions about what we are doing to ourselves, especially the young. We have some government publicity, and the seriousness of government can be measured by the size of the entertainment expenses of the Departments of State and all the Quangos. It takes some doing to shift booze on that scale. The affairs of state may be in chaos, but we lead the world in the size of our official drinks bills. It adds to the spending for economic growth, call it practical quantatitive easing.

One thing is certain, it is all a lot easier to do, and to fund these days for everyone from the age of eight and upwards (yes I have since kids swigging white cider) to an extent impossible fifty years ago. Moreover, there is a seamless transition. Long ago there were few cheap fizzy drinks for the masses, in recent decades there is now an abundance of all sorts of stuff, much of it choc a bloc with stimulants in the form of caffeine and high power sweeteners, sugars, and synthetic flavourings.

From there it is a very short step to alcopops, much the same sort of chemical mix but with alcohol; sometimes not so strong, but far stronger than a 1950’s pint of bitter. Once there, then the cocktails of fashion, and strong other drinks follow. Some of this is not so good, cheap eastern vodkas giving instant brain damage for the unwary. With so many outlets selling a wide variety, so much time available, so much credit, and a lifestyle culture for many of the young now built around binge drinking, the consequences are inevitable. For those who are more fastidious, the supermarkets now offer a range of wines at a comparative price that once would have been a good class stock in the few wine merchants in the provinces.

It is probable that in attempting to control the drink problems, the game is now lost, and the situation irrecoverable. When politicians, indeed party leaders, head marches of protest to the closure of a booze bottling plant as a sure fire way of winning voter sympathy and hopefully their votes, it says a lot about attitudes to temperance. Especially, when evidence points to alcoholic abuse being a major problem in the constituencies they hope to win. The Pubcorps have made great efforts, closing down tens of thousands of pubs in the name of the greater glory of property development, and leaving many small communities without any alcohol outlets, but the supermarkets have more than made up for it by all their cheap offers across the board, or rather counter.

The trouble is that the politicians do not appreciate the implications of letting it all hang out, and not simply in health terms. It involves policing, more on the streets, with more powers to deal with the consequences. It involves difficult tax issues. It involves careful monitoring of what is on sale, to get rid of the increasing amount of toxic stuff that is out there. It involves more closely monitoring all the outlets. In our modern world there is no hope of recreating any of the movements of the past. To attempt to go back to the limitations of the past is electoral suicide for any party that attempted it. Education is hopeless, with teachers claiming it is a human right to get plastered at weekends, possibly in the same pubs and clubs as the kids.

So any control or regulation is down to ourselves, and how much notice we take of the doctors, and the occasional homily from individuals, like Frank Skinner. Anyone for a cup of tea?