Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics. Philip Collins
when resentment turns into hostility. It could yet get worse for this group of people because those who have suffered pay stagnation, and who are struggling to pay for housing, work in food services, retail, construction, information technology and manufacturing, exactly the sorts of trades most at risk from the threat of automation. This brings us to the fourth condition of Britain question.
4 How Do We Make Technology Work for Us?
The dystopian vision of work in the future is prosperity without people. The trends that have generated income and wealth inequality will be accelerated. Automation threatens to funnel rewards to the owners of capital as human labour is replaced by technology. Every previous revolution in technology has increased productivity and therefore prosperity while, at the same time, creating a new set of opportunities for work. The fear is that the rule of the robots will be different. A cloud hangs over the future of work; a cloud in cyber-space, annexing all of the routine functions on which an economy depends.
There are plenty of studies like the latest one from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in which it is estimated that half of all jobs, across thirty-two countries, stand at some degree of risk from automation. The Bank of England has calculated that a third of all jobs in Britain face a high risk and a further third face a moderate risk. This accounts for 15 million jobs in total, an apocalyptic forecast with no precedent. Of course, fears about the damage that technology will do to employment go back as far as the wheel. The Industrial Revolution, which brought prosperity to Bury, prompted anxiety, which was in the event unfounded, that human labour would be systematically displaced by machines. We have always adapted before, but perhaps the age of automation will be different. Progress in computing capacity has been truly astonishing. Genius machines can do complex mathematics, medical diagnosis, select stocks for a mutual fund portfolio and beat Garry Kasparov at chess. It may be that the combination of immense labour power in robots that never tire and the artificial brain capacity they now purvey will change all the economic rules.
In previous industrial revolutions the threat was confined to work done by hand. The threat of the revolution to come is that work done by brain is also colonised. The immediate threat, though, is to administrative, clerical and production tasks, precisely those that tend to command the lowest wages. This raises, in turn, the fear that automation intensifies material inequality. The more that an industry is mechanised the more its rewards accrue to the owners of capital and the less to the bearers of labour. This would be disastrous in the pursuit of equal life chances for all. This is the fifth condition of Britain question.
5 How Can We Improve Life Chances?
My grandfather was born in 1910 and died in 1994. During his lifetime, Britain changed from manufacturing to service, from blue-collar to white. When he was born, fewer than a fifth of all jobs were classified in the top two social tiers. By the time he died, two-fifths were. This is the story of John Braine’s 1957 novel Room at the Top, in which we follow Joe Lampton through the tiered class system. Like Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joe Lampton is an orphan but, unlike Tom Jones, Joe does not turn out to have been of noble birth all along. He gets there by his own effort and his own talent. For a generation, the Joe Lamptons kept on coming.
But then, not long after my grandfather retired, a disaster hit our town as it did so many others of its type. The textile mills closed and too many of the fathers of my generation were signed off on the sick. Unemployment is a contagion; half the children in Britain with unemployed fathers are unemployed adults themselves now. In Bury, manufacturing declined rapidly. There are wards in the town, among the 10 per cent most deprived in the country, in which a fifth of the people are out of work.
I am fortunate that mine is a story of social mobility. Having joined the bourgeoisie through education, I confirmed my place through marriage. As a child I don’t recall ever meeting a doctor unless I was ill. My wife comes from a family that barely knew anyone who wasn’t a doctor. From a desirable London postcode close to Milbourne House, where Fielding wrote Tom Jones, we now do our best to ensure that our own children have a head start in the race of life. In 1693 John Locke wrote a parenting guide called Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in which he recommended that children need eat no vegetables but should take care to be born to the right parents. Locke was a better developmental psychologist than he was a dietician. The children of a pair of professionals will, by the age of three, have heard a million more words than the offspring of less articulate parents. On their first day at school, children from poorer homes turn up less literate, numerate and articulate than their richer peers.
During the era in which the growth of professions such as law and accountancy was creating more room at the top, it was possible for British politics to offer a welcome social mobility in which some went up but nobody fell down. We need to remember that it was never really social engineering that did the work of mobility in Britain. It was civil engineering. Unless our time witnesses a rapid expansion in the fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, then the rise of one daughter of the working class is going to require the fall of a son of the bourgeoisie. What Gore Vidal said of friendship is now true of life chances in Britain: ‘it is not enough that you should succeed. Others must fail.’
The most vivid image of British society during the twentieth century is to imagine a race run twice, once in 1900 and then again in 2000. All the participants run faster than they did a century ago. The winners and losers, though, are essentially the same. A child born middle-class today is fifteen times more likely to have remained a middle-class adult than a child born working-class. A man who is forty today is more likely to stay in his father’s social class than his equivalent born a generation before. He is also, for a series of complex reasons, likely to enjoy a less prosperous life than his father did. Justice between the generations is the next question the country faces.
6 How Do We Ensure Justice between the Generations?
Walshaw Hall, once the grand pile of James Kenyon, is now a residential care home. Britain is growing older and a society so elderly presents political problems of a sort no nation has ever before encountered. A new line is being drawn: old against young. It is not true, as it is sometimes alleged, that my mother’s generation, born just before, during and after the Second World War, have purloined the assets or stolen the future. Cohorts do not act consciously as a single cunning alliance and, besides, ensuring dignity in old age is one of Britain’s biggest concerns. The provision of social care, for example, does not currently respect this principle.
The flow of assets towards my mother’s generation has largely been an effect of size. The doubling in education spending between 1953 and 1973 occurred because of the boom in babies that needed schooling. Those babies have now grown up and, in the strange way that the end of life mimics the start, need looking after again. The growth in life expectancy, from fifty-one for men and fifty-five for women born in 1910 to seventy-nine for men and eighty-three for women today, means that more of the large generation have survived into old age and expensive infirmity. This is why NHS spending keeps increasing. This is why pensions now account for a quarter of all public spending. This is the baby boom and bust.
My mother has gone now, but plenty of her generation are still going strong and, quite understandably, feel justified in drawing their entitlements. After a lifetime of paying in, retirement is their moment for a pay-out. However, because they are such a large generation they are taking out more than they ever put in. The generation born between 1956 and 1961 will take from the welfare state 118 per cent of their contribution. To be a pensioner was once a proxy for being poor and it is a cause for celebration that this is no longer true. The trouble is that we are struggling to pay the bill. The problem is exacerbated by the machinery of politics. Older people vote in greater numbers than younger people and, for that reason, the value of benefits to pensioners has tripled since 1979. Pensioners were deliberately protected, in a way that no other group was, from the consequences of austerity after the financial crash. Politics has become an auction house in which most of the lots appeal to the elderly.
The consequence, unless we settle the question of generational justice, will be a spending crisis of the first order. On current