If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Unless you’re an Old Etonian millionaire, in which case bang your fists noisily on the Cabinet table and shout “Hooray”. Yes, the country’s best-paid search and rescue helicopter pilot is marrying a woman who dresses like her mother – but, sadly, not like her fiancé’s mother. Getting dressed in the morning and again differently at intervals throughout the day, was one of the few things Princess Diana got right – that and leaving the royal family.
It’s like the 1980s all over again. Troops returning from distant conflicts abroad to join increasingly long unemployment queues at home, while a lunatic right-wing fringe tells us we’venever had it so good. We’ve even got Bon Jovi and Annie Lennox riding high in the charts again.
And if the royal wedding doesn’t make you want to run naked down the Mall screaming with joy, David Cameron has found £2 million down the back of the Downing Street sofa which he plans to spend discovering what will. Now, measuring happiness is a famously inexact science – a little like trying to work out exactly what the royal family is actually for. Even Tony Blair was forced to abandon the idea as “impractical” and, if someone so attuned to the sensitivities of the electorate, thought the idea more trouble than it was worth, then it probably was.
Apparently, this is about more than Cameron simply wanting to cheer us up. According to the Prime Minister, a new measure of national well-being “could give us a general picture of whether life is improving” – I’ll save him the bother, it isn’t – and eventually “lead to government policy that is more focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile”. In other words we’re all going to get poorer, but never mind, there’s a big party to look forward to.
Cameron wants Britain to be “in the vanguard” of efforts throughout the world to change the accepted measures of national progress “rather than following meekly behind”. He wants to ruin us from the front.
The Office for National Statistics will lead a debate called the “National Wellbeing Project”, which will seek to establish the key areas that matter most to people’s contentment.
Potential indicators for analysis include how people view their own health, levels of education, inequalities in income and the environment – all areas where we’re entirely reliant on government.
Yet frontline National Health Services are under attack, Cameron’s commitments to the environment have been shelved due to lack of money and political will, income differentials are widening and the cost of an education has risen exponentially – although, as Kate Middleton’s parents can confirm, it’s still possible to fork out thousands of pounds on an education and still not find a proper job at the end of it. No wonder we’re all so bloody miserable.
Surely it cannot be coincidence that Scandinavian and northern European countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, topped the Gallup world poll of top 10 happy countries earlier this year? All have a comprehensive welfare state managed by strongly interventionist governments.
Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist who developed the poll says: “One theory [to explain why these countries are happiest] is that they have their basic needs taken care of to a higher degree than other countries. When we look at all the data, those basic needs explain the relationship between income and wellbeing.”
Yet Cameron’s “Big Society’ would have us take care of many of these basic needs for ourselves. While Cameron is to be congratulated for recognising the obvious – that the relationship between overall life satisfaction and wealth may not be as straightforward as previously thought – it seems unlikely that his National Wellbeing Project is motivated by anything other than a desire to cut public spending still further, despite overwhelming evidence that the only satisfactory compensation for diminishing personal wealth is increased public spending, not less.
One thing to be said for Cameron (and Blair before him) is that he has never shied away from expressing a view likely to invite public ridicule. But being told that there’s more to life than money by a grinning millionaire savant might prove too much to stomach for many. Ask a millionaire if they are happy and they are likely to answer in the affirmative. Ask an unemployed person the same question and they are more likely to punch you in the face. It’s not rocket science.
If Cameron really wishes to boost the nation’s general wellbeing, then it’s really very simple. Ensure people are employed in meaningful jobs at a fair wage so that that they can enjoy their non-working life to the full. At a time when the average chief executive’s pay has jumped by 55 per cent since last year (I bet they’re happy), a decent increase in the national minimum wage would ensure millions of working families are not left in poverty, while saving the Government millions in the long term as people are given incentives to move into work.
The TUC claims that a 3.5 per cent increase in the minimum wage would give the Treasury an additional £235 million in tax revenue – more than enough to provide for the happiness of at least one young couple just starting out. At least we can all look forward to an extra day off work – unless you don’t have a job in the first place.
